Like Everybody Else
by the daroga
Summary: A sequel to the events of the novel, Christine returns to Erik to live as his wife. But the promises Erik made are difficult to keep, and a kiss is not enough. Thanks to Stefanie Bean for her editing help and Joy for her support and inspiration.
1. Chapter 1

Author's note:

I actually dislike author's notes which attempt to excuse what one is about to read. Feel free to skip this, or come back when you're done, but I felt I must include a few words as to the origins of this story.

I actually finished it in February of 2004, before I had found LJ, before I had re-joined fandom. It's probably the last sustained piece of writing I did, and that's part of the reason I'm posting it at last. I kept intending to fix it, to rewrite, to make it fall more in line with my thinking about these characters now. This Erik is not Leroux's—I hope he is mine, but in his self-awareness and sarcasm he feels a little too much like Kay's despite the fact that at the time of writing I hadn't read her in ten years. It tells more than it shows. But I've come to a point where I realize I'm not going to re-do this particular story, because it would no longer be the same one with the same themes or characters. And I think this story, unlike as it is to what I might write now, has something to offer, and may entertain people. I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

* * *

_I'm not really a bad man. Love me and you'll see! To be good, all I ever needed was to be loved. If you loved me, I'd be as gentle as a lamb and you could do whatever you pleased with me._

Gaston Leroux, _The Phantom of the Opera_

"Erik?"

I was certain I was dreaming. It was the only explanation, and a sound one too, since the likelihood of my madness and grief producing hallucinations far outweighed the likelihood of her ever returning. Oh, I'd been mad to love her, to even dream of touching her. I was mad now, laid out in state on her bed like dead royalty in a processional, clutching that stupid veil between my crossed arms.

"Erik, are you here?"

I recognized her voice, too. I'd remember it until I died, which wouldn't be too long now, I hoped, and I'd likely remember it after. If there was a God, and I was willing to bet He did exist just to spite me, the worst punishment I could envision was an afterlife of eternal memory. That innocent, childish voice of hers agreeing to run away with the boy replayed in an endless loop like one of those contraptions you put a franc in and look through to see a horse running or some such. She'd told me about those one day, completely enchanted and blissfully ignorant of the simplicity of the device until I'd made one for her and explained how it worked, after which her face had fallen like a child learning that the moon was a great mass of rock. "But the pictures _aren't_ still," she'd insisted stubbornly. "I can see them moving." The result, the fantasy, was what intrigued her, never the inner workings. A scientist my Christine was not.

There I went again. I even thought of her possessively, which only proved I could never have been all that aware of her inner workings to believe I'd owned even a part of her. I had to stop myself thinking that way. My ignorance had never been blissful, and I hadn't even the comfort of Christine's excuses of youth and inexperience and, frankly, a lack of curiosity. I'd walked into my hell, eyes open.

But then, it wasn't as if it had been a long journey from the purgatorial void I'd squatted in previously. I should consider myself lucky, I thought, that it had finally ended. Fortunate that the hope I'd thought myself rid of years ago that had flared up with her dramatic entrance had finally, truly, burned off and that I had no more strength to keep up this charade of life. I was finished with this world, and it had been waiting to be rid of me for nigh on fifty years, now. If I lay here for long enough perhaps it would think me dead. A little longer, and I could perhaps convince myself. And if I could believe it, my body would not lag far behind. Bodies were so fragile, really. So simple to destroy, and I'd done my share. But this last murder would not require my strength or my clever hands. For the first time, my weakness would deal the fatal blow.

In the meantime, I hoped the voices would stop long enough for me to die in peace, whatever awaited me after. Strange how I thought of her as soft-spoken, when she had the voice of a trained operatic soprano. The girl was capable of such noise, when she wanted to. But I didn't want to hear her right now, and since she was all in my head it should be a simple matter to block her out. Was my brain so far deteriorated that I could not even command its silence? Another sign that it was time to go; my mind had always been my only asset, and the disaster with Christine had irreparably upset the balance it had created for me. It had never been quiet, though, I mused. I had never been able to turn it off. Always thinking, inventing, composing, cursing, even when my body had fully withdrawn from its surroundings. Even now, my eyes scanned the ceiling, counting the hairline cracks in the plaster I'd installed so she wouldn't be faced with the roughness of hewn stone; a roughness I'd preserved in the rest of the house as a reminder of the inherent possibilities of rawness. My eyes drew new designs on the molded and carved surface and I found myself making plans to improve on the initial design, because there really shouldn't be cracks there already and I must have miscalculated the weight and anyway, Christine would have preferred flowers or vines to those ridiculous comedy/tragedy masks—

I shut my eyes defiantly. She wasn't coming back. It wasn't as if the ceiling had run her off, anyway, any more than the wardrobe of new dresses or the silver-handled brushes and hand mirror. It was me. My soul, ugly and rank, hidden beneath layers of blood and filth so thick even I had been able to forget it for a time. I had read the wrong books; my mind had been filled with rescued damsels and princes triumphant. I laughed, or thought I did; I don't know whether there was any sound. The books hadn't been wrong. I'd just forgotten to read the cast list. She was right, they were all right, to hate this face. It only mirrored what lay within. Fair warning. Funny how easy it was to come to terms with my face when I simply admitted my sin. The stone which made up the walls of my home could be carved and polished and shaped into Michelangelo's David, but my soul was in a continual process of decay and there was nothing my artistry could do about it. Best for the rest of my body to catch up to the festering travesty of my face. I only hoped the end would come soon. I'd never been good at waiting.

"Oh God," her phantom voice gasped, and she seemed so close. Perhaps it wasn't a hallucination-after all, was there a more fitting punishment for me than to be haunted by her as I had tormented the floors above all these years? "Erik, don't be dead. God, please don't let him be dead." So predictable, my mind. Too many operas, too many last-minute reconciliations. As if anything really happened that way. The bed seemed to dip on one side but I waited to open my eyes, willing away this latest torture. I really was insane. And that touch on my wrist, those fingers feeling for my pulse, that couldn't be real. It couldn't. I opened my eyes.

"Oh!" The look of surprise on her face was almost comic, but her round eyes quickly filled with tears as she leaned her bowed head on my shoulder. "I thought you were dead, Erik. You looked dead—I… I mean you were so still, I couldn't see you breathing." I blinked as sensation returned to my body, and wondered for the first time how long I had been lying here. I felt weak. I had been farther along than I had thought, unless this really was just an extremely detailed dream. She knelt at the side of the bed, waiting expectantly for something. I had no idea why she was here, so I had no idea what to give her. "Why won't you say something?"

"Christine," I whispered, the hoarseness of my voice evidence of that I'd been here for some time and that this wasn't a dream. I wasn't sure if even my imagination was this involved, either.

She smiled, but it looked strange through her tears. "Who else?"

I tried to rouse myself. It didn't matter whether she was really here or not, did it? I might as well make the most of whatever trick was being played on me. It had to be a trick; even looking at her was torture, betrayal in liquid form injected into the vein. "Christine, what are you doing here?" Apparently my mouth had not received the caution signals my brain was sending out. "I sent you home with the boy." Hadn't I?

That caused a fresh outbreak of tears. "I know, Erik, I know. Can you ever forgive me for going? I didn't know what I was doing, and you frightened me so, I didn't know what you would do. I didn't dare argue. But I didn't want to go."

"You gave a good impression of it." Sarcasm was always lost on the girl, but it never stopped me from using it.

"The whole way home I was thinking about you, hoping you would still be here when I got back, because I knew even then that I couldn't marry him, no matter what you said, and it took me a whole week to get back and I was so afraid I might be too late."

My head hurt and I was beginning to regret all those hours spent teaching her breath control. "Hush, Christine, you don't know what you're saying." A week? Had it been a week? No wonder my arms were loath to respond to my command. And where was that damned daroga?

"Yes I do. I'm staying with you, Erik. I've chosen." Her face, so serious and sweet, held a determination I had seen only once or twice but knew brooked no opposition.

"I don't believe you." Did she expect me to roll over and take whatever new torture she'd decided to visit upon me in my weakened and defenseless state? She had to have known this would kill me. "Why couldn't you have just let me die in peace, for once?"

She shook her head wildly. "No, don't say that! I don't want you to die at all. Aren't you listening to me? I came back. I'm staying."

"Right. Can we get to the part where the big puppy shows up to rescue you? I just want to know so I can put the breakables in a safe place." I was reaching for the insults now. She'd already broken the only thing I couldn't replace.

"I left him, Erik. I told him I wasn't going to marry him." She actually sounded like she meant it, but then her acting had gotten so much better lately. "I made a vow to you, and I broke it. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I'm here and I'm going to stay here. I realized that this… this is where I belong. Raoul doesn't understand the opera, he doesn't understand me. He doesn't need me."

God, this was exhausting. "So that's it? I'm your little project?"

She leaned over me and kissed my forehead, my eyes, my chin, and it felt like a benediction until she brushed my lips with hers and it felt like something else entirely. "I'm going to save you," she whispered, and God help me, I believed her. For all my voiced scorn, I didn't actually believe she was capable of such premeditated deceit. The elopement was another matter entirely; she was too innocent to even conceive of maliciousness.

And it didn't matter at all whether I believed her, because I wanted to. I wanted to more than anything, and I knew that even if this was my hell, I would do it all again for a moment of her acceptance. Of her seeing me as a man. If it all ended again with her delicate hands shoving the knife between my ribs, it was worth it for the touch of her lips.

I struggled upright, and she dutifully piled an extra pillow behind my back. "That's it," she said reassuringly. "We're together now. I'm going to make you so happy." As much as I'd seen and been and done, those simple words should have made me cringe like the vengeful cynic I'd worked so hard to become. And yet I found myself returning her smile, felt the heat of my love for her warm my cold flesh. I loved her beyond sense, beyond reason. She'd always been able to make me believe anything was possible, even if I had to kill everyone in Paris to accomplish it. Logic and experience were just hapless passengers where she was concerned.

She flitted around me, and for once I was content to let her tend to me like a child, or at any rate what I imagined it might be like. The apathy was leaching away, and my mind, which had been in some sort of shock after her return, was starting to turn her words over again and again. She was staying. She'd chosen me. The silly, handsome boy had lost. I was almost giddy with triumph, and when she walked out with the remains of the soup she'd made and I finally looked to the door the sight of a tiny army of valises and suitcases threatened to send me into a state of catatonic bliss.

"You really mean it," I said when she entered, and she laughed softly, knelt at my side again, brushing a lank bit of hair back from my forehead though God knew it wasn't covering anything worth seeing. Perhaps I should grow my hair long enough to cover the whole blasted thing, I thought. The opera werewolf.

"Of course I mean it. I never meant to hurt you, Erik. I know it doesn't seem like it, but I… I was so confused. I didn't know what to do, and Raoul seemed so safe. It was so easy to do what he said. You're… you're not easy."

I shook my head ruefully. "No, I'm not. It was very brave of you to come back, Christine. You made the hard choice. You know that, don't you?"

She nodded, happy and proud, but I couldn't help but think that she actually didn't foresee any difficulties at all. She never looked ahead, not really. "Are you feeling better?"

"A miraculous recovery, thanks to you." I felt buoyant, drunk, and I was fairly certain that a ridiculous grin had affixed itself to my already beleaguered face. "Just seeing you again, Christine. So beautiful, so perfect." She blushed, though I knew she'd had no shortage of compliments during her brief tenure as prima donna. "Such an angel… you could bring any man back to life." I had to be drunk, I thought, to spout third-rate dialogue like that. She didn't seem to notice the hack job I was doing of our reunion, and if she was happy, then I wasn't about to complain.

"Are you happy I'm back?" she asked surprisingly.

"Happy doesn't begin to cover it." I stretched my arms out experimentally. "A few more days of your care and I'll be in a better position to show you." If she caught any untoward undertones in that statement, she didn't let on, but I was too exhausted to care.

"I should let you sleep. Can you sleep?"

"If I can go to sleep knowing you'll still be here when I wake."

"I promise." She smiled again and I nearly jumped out of bed then. "I'll be on the sofa if you need anything."

"This is your room," I pointed out.

"I know, I just… I'll take the sofa. I don't want to disturb you. You gave me such a fright. I don't want to risk losing you again." I forbore to point out that I had no need to be half-dead to be frightening, or that losing me had never been a possibility.

"You needn't worry, Christine. I have a few years in me left. I'm not leaving any time soon." She kissed me chastely on the forehead again and closed the door behind her, but I could hear her moving around the other room. If she left during the night I would surely die, but it wasn't any worse than what awaited me before. And I had gotten to hear her voice again.

But on the other hand, perhaps she intended to stay, and perhaps she would. In that case, I decided, I would have to make myself worthy of her, and of the sacrifice she had made to come here. How difficult could it be? She was my angel, my life, my savior. How could the sins of my past withstand such radiance, such innocence? She was right. She had saved me already.


	2. Chapter 2

Note: If you like this, you can find it and other fanfiction at The Fifth Cellar (.com).

I slept the sleep of an ordinary, exhausted man, rather than the half-waking delirium of the barely-alive. And I dreamed ordinary dreams which, on waking, I thought had only been sent to taunt me until memory returned and I realized they had come true. I had to see for myself though. She could have left, the vicomte (or was he Comte de Chagny, now?) could have arrived in the night and taken her off again, the daroga could have broken in and convinced her to make love beside my comatose body before whisking her back to Persia-any number of scenarios played out in my mind in ever-increasing theatricality. I shook them off and rose from my bed, slightly unsteady but upright. I would have to go back to my own wardrobe for fresh clothes, as those I wore had become fairly rank, but I would just look in on her first. There wasn't any point wasting energy bathing if I was just going to die again.

The packages and things were still piled in the doorway to her bedroom, so unless she had forgotten them in her flight she remained here. I crept around the corner like a child breathlessly torturing himself by postponing his first sight of the tree on Christmas morning. The sight that greeted me was far lovelier than any Christmas gift, wrapped in silk and lace and flesh. I had watched Christine in sleep before but for the first time I felt I had the right to, that she was mine at last, truly mine. She looked so alive even in her stillness, even as I was at my most incongruously dead when in action. I wanted to stay and watch her until she awoke, but I tore myself away. I could hardly expect to present her with such a glorious sight upon waking, but at the very least I could be decent.

I wanted to linger in the marble bath, letting the hot water dissolve the sweat and grime from my body as Christine's presence was eating away at the hard shell around my soul, but I was worried lest she awake before I was ready. I wanted to look immaculate; I was too thin, as always, but a good tailor was worth all the threats of secrecy I could make. I was not yet feeble. My recent failed surrender had more to do with my will than this body which had kept me alive and moving long past my usefulness to myself or the world. It was morning, but I put on a pressed evening suit anyway. I wanted her to be impressed. I wanted to make sure she had not a twinge of doubt about what she had done. I would never be her vicomte, with his unlined face and blond hair and exuberance, but he would look like me soon enough and I at least could give her my talent and soul and impeccable taste. Her pathetic former suitor certainly didn't approach me there.

Former suitor. I wondered where he was now; if he was grief-stricken or if he had already moved on (my imagination suggested a suitably disease-ridden house of ill repute) or if he was perhaps on his way here at this very moment. I wouldn't hesitate to kill him now, now that Christine had made her choice clear. Before, his death would only have accomplished her certain hatred and disgust. Now I had no such impediment.

I sketched gleeful portraits in my mind of his disillusionment and death as I finished my toilet and walked back towards the sitting room where Christine slept. I settled into an armchair across from the sofa to watch her sleep. Her breath disturbed a curl of her hair which she had let down and now lay across her breast as it gently rose and fell. Had she told him where she was going? Had they fought? Had he given up, knowing the futility of his cause? If he had, I thought with disgust, he was a fool. But I couldn't be too terribly critical of his foolishness, if it had allowed me the prize. As closely as I was observing her, I heard the change in her breathing before she opened her eyes. Did she remember where she was, or had she been dreaming of him? Perhaps she thought herself safe in her room, or in his bed. But no, the eyes that opened were bright and focused, and the smile was meant entirely for me.

"Good morning, princess," I said softly. I knew my voice was capable of many things, and most of them were beautiful and terrible both, but the tenderness I heard there now was always unexpected and wondrous to me.

"Should you be up, Erik?" she asked nervously. She sat up and tried to arrange herself, blushing slightly. Her skin was so fine, it showed her every humor.

"I'm perfectly well. Completely cured." It was too bad my peculiar restorative powers had never extended to healing my face. I wore the mask now; for all her protestations the day before, I couldn't be sure she really accepted what she'd chosen. If I could barely stand to look in a mirror after all these years, I could hardly expect her to want it in front of her all the time. "I imagine you would like to freshen up."

She nodded. "I brought some things."

"I noticed." They were piled in the doorway like a child's abandoned building blocks. "Why don't you do what you like while I find us some breakfast."

She smiled. "I would like that," she said, flitting forward and bending as if to kiss my forehead. She paused in the act and had already turned away when I remembered the mask. When she turned again in the doorway to face me, her arms full of luggage, she wore a vaguely worried expression. "You don't need that anymore," she said simply, and was gone, and I could have skipped to the kitchen, had I ever been wont to do that sort of thing. I kept the mask on, for now. There was a kind of security in it, in trying to make things easier for her.

No. If I was going to launch into this new plan of being worthy of her, I would have to be honest, at least with myself. It wasn't Christine I needed to make this easier for. It was a foolish thought, but I couldn't help but see the mask as a barrier between what went on in my diseased brain and what she knew. Just the thought, the knowledge, that Christine was at this moment engaged in soaking her delicate, bare skin in the marble tub I'd installed was enough to send my imagination sailing to unknown parts and make me feel like the dirtiest, most undeserving cad who'd ever fooled a girl into leaving her fiancé. Here there be dragons, indeed, and even if I was unfamiliar with the territory, I knew that one of the monsters lying in wait was myself. The mask was a flimsy defense, but she was so close, so nearly mine, that it was all I had. We hadn't talked about this part of the arrangement, but even such an innocent as she was could have no doubts about what her decision meant. She'd heard my music, for God's sake. And even if the kisses of her bloodless hero hadn't awakened anything within her, surely she'd been privy to the ribald conversations of the other girls. Tales that could make me blush, though I doubted it looked as fetching on my cheeks.

So I schooled my thoughts as I absently moved about the kitchen. I'd had a great deal of practice in that, these last months, but now it couldn't be so terribly wrong to imagine the rosy tint the water's heat would give her skin, or the way her wet hair would fall in tendrils down her shoulders and her chest, how her eyes would slide shut from the purely sensual pleasure of being warm and immersed and when she was done she would rise from the bath, gradually clearing the inadequate veil the bubbles provided, until—

"Is breakfast ready?" Christine asked. I couldn't look at her right away, not until I'd banished the thought of her naked form from my thoughts, so I looked at the stove instead and discovered I'd made an omelet.

"Yes," I said obviously as I imagined how soft and fresh her skin must feel right now, scrubbed and warm and now enveloped in the miles of frills and flounces and buttons that ladies called fashion. I looked up to see her standing beside me, looking down at the sizzling mass on the stove.

"It will burn," she said, and I turned off the gas. The omelet was big enough for both of us. I'd never had much of an appetite, and it had grown less now that the deterioration of my sense of smell had rendered all but the most bitter food virtually tasteless.

"You look lovely, my dear." Like a bride, I almost added, but refrained. Her dress was virginal white, lacy and fine, almost like a ballerina, and I wondered if indeed I'd stolen it from the costume shop. I couldn't remember, but there were other things to think about, like the way her eyes did not waver from mine even as I took in the details of her rosy-cheeked, freshly washed appearance. "Shall we?" I motioned to the dining room, and Christine led the way, carrying the plates on which I would serve our breakfast.

"Are you going to eat?" she asked anxiously, but from concern for my well-being or anticipated dread at watching the process I was not certain. "You've not eaten anything except for the soup in days." Well then. I removed the mask slowly, wondering if I wrote my thoughts on my face the way she did, wondering if she could tell any of what I'd been thinking, was still thinking, about her. But no, she was as careless of my expressions as she was of the rest of my face; it was just something to let your eyes gloss over, because it did not bear thinking heavily on. Ignoring it was really the best policy. It was easier for me, being on the other side, perhaps. I divided the omelet and we sat, not at opposite ends of the table as we had in the beginning, but at the corner. She really was amazing, the way she had decided to forget what I looked like as if there was no more to it than that. And she'd come back to me. The greatest miracle of all. Watching her work healthily away at the food I'd made for her, I knew everything was as it should be. Perfect.

"It's very good," she said after primly wiping her mouth with a napkin. "Of course, you're always making wonderful things."

"Flattery will get you everywhere, my dove," I said dryly and picked up the dishes. "No, I'll wash up. I want you to decide what we're doing today."

She perked up at that. "Oh! Well I thought I should go see the managers, let them know I'm not retiring. I might have to take some chorus roles for awhile, I suppose, but I'm sure they won't hold that… night… against me. I'll just explain—"

"I rather thought we could spend the day together, love." The thought of her leaving again so soon filled me with dread. So much could happen up there. I couldn't be sure who she'd see or who would see her and what they might convince her of. I was convinced I'd never see her again.

"How thoughtless of me. I can go tomorrow, or another day. I should have thought. You're not going to lose me, Erik. I told you what I've decided. I'm not going to do that to you again."

"I know, I know. But let's just… let's enjoy each other's company today. It feels like months since I saw you." But I didn't want to think about the last time I saw her, what I'd said, what I'd done to her, watching that fool place his jacket around her shoulders in a clearly proprietary gesture. As if he was the alpha dog in our trio, though I supposed I had just rolled over and given her away—

No, that hadn't been weakness. It had been my salvation, the reason I had been granted Christine's return and her solemn promise. For once in my life, I'd been rewarded for a good deed.

"That sounds nice, Erik. What would you like to do?" What didn't I, Christine, when you looked up at me with your impossibly innocent eyes as if I'd just removed your veil and it only needed a kiss to seal the vow between us—but we'd had that kiss already, hadn't we? What came after?

I wrenched my thoughts away from the creative scenarios her question had prompted. Women wanted wooing, and no matter how willingly she'd put herself in my power, I would wait for the right time. "Would you like to sing? It won't do to let yourself get out of practice."

"I know I haven't been practicing the past few days. I've been a little preoccupied." She followed me to the piano.

"Understandable, Christine. Here, shall we go over _Aida_?" She nodded happily and we launched into her warm up. She really had improved, I thought with pride. I had fashioned her voice from rough marble, like the David, until it shone, nearly transparent. And there was something else that hadn't been there before, a hint of the life she'd experienced in the past year that lent her voice a depth that went beyond the purely technical. She was always, now, at her most realistic and lively when singing. There was some inner passion she kept in reserve in daily life so that it always surprised you when it burst forth in her voice.

But I could never tell how much of it was training, and how much she actually connected to what she sang. Did she sense the appropriateness of the piece I'd chosen? Was she even now thinking about joining her lover in death, in the dark, rather than choosing the light? I joined her, singing the other parts as necessary. When we'd finished, when Aida had pledged herself to a dead man, I looked up after the last chord to see her eyes shining from unshed tears. Was she reconsidering her decision? Or was she moved by the slave girl's loyalty to her lover?

"That was exquisite, Christine," I told her. I was curiously moved myself; but then, I'd always had trouble keeping my feelings in reserve whenever music or Christine was involved. I stood, and something in her white, trembling form, in those huge glistening eyes, made me bend my face to hers, made me touch my twisted lips to her forehead, her eyes in turn. She'd promised herself to me, and the effort to wait for that promise while she was living here, just a room away, had been so monumental. I wasn't sure I could wait any longer. Neither did I want to.

I had never kissed her of my own volition, but desire was roiling in me now and I was incapable of damming it back up. So long, so long I'd waited for this moment, for this woman (any woman, but not just any woman) and there was no reason to wait any longer.

"You came back to me," I said, my voice suddenly stripped of its beauty. She nodded. I took that as tacit agreement and kissed her, finally, on the mouth. I felt her, warm and soft against my lips, and I reached for her to draw her close. I had never stood this close to her, though I had carried her before, all the while trying to ignore what I felt through her clothes. Now I savored the sensation, even with all these layers between us. She was mine, mine to claim, as I was hers.

I carried her to her bedroom, laid her in her bed, my deathbed. She was silent but looked up at me with a queer expression I, for once, could not read. "I want to see you," I said. "I've waited so long to see you…" I started with the buttons, my usually clever fingers suddenly stupid with her. Something seemed to be wrong with my body, and command of it came less easily. Finally the dress was off, discarded like an envelope which has served its purpose. What was left seemed like miles of petticoats and corsets and things I wasn't certain of the name for, and finally she moved, pushed my hands away, and began undoing the complicated machinery which held everything together. Her hands were shaking too, I noticed, but then my eyes were drawn elsewhere as she revealed, inch by inch, her white skin. Skin none but her husband had the right to see, and now I held that exalted position. In deed, if not in name, for as romantic and foolish as she had made me I had no illusions that we could actually wed. I wasn't even sure I was a legal entity anymore, and furthermore I was convinced that no priest upon seeing me would consent to such a union.

When the ties and bows and buttons were undone, she lay back, and I was given the last, breathless gift of parting the folds of cloth, peeling away the cloth that seemed, in the western world at least, to be just an extension of skin, for all you ever learned of what lay beneath. She was so beautiful, more beautiful than I could imagine, skin smooth and perfect like a doll's porcelain face, so white it was difficult to tell if blood ran through her at all. Like a marble statue, her body fashioned by God, or Nature, just as I had formed her voice. I was content to share authorship of such perfection.

But it was all so agonizingly slow. Now that I had decided, now that she had given herself up to me, I didn't want to wait any longer. I had worshiped her for so long. I knew, in the back of my mind, that I was supposed to be gentle, gentlemanly, but the need was so intense I realized it was a very fortunate thing I had never before let it get the slightest advantage over me. I fairly tore off my clothes, but she didn't even look, her eyes wide and fixed on my face. Except for her eyes, she might have been dead. She was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, more beautiful even than Michelangelo's Pieta, or the ruins of Athens, more beautiful than anything the hand of Man could create. I wondered if my suddenly imperfect, hopelessly bloody hands would mar her, would alter her somehow from the finely-crafted work she was.

I had heard about what was supposed to happen. I had good ears, and while I generally distanced myself from the pain of such conversations, I had picked up enough. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to feel this as well. I lowered myself over her. I wanted to explore every inch of her perfect body, naked now but for the plain gold ring I'd given her a lifetime ago.

But perhaps that would have to wait. I recognized the feeling growing in me, the feeling that preceded the thing my mother had beaten me so soundly for. "Filthy!" she'd yelled. "You dirty creature, demon child! Do you want to go to Hell? Do you? Well perhaps you ought to. It's the only place you'll ever belong!" I didn't care anymore, I didn't care, this was good, this was marriage, sanctified, even if God hadn't presided, I didn't care, because it felt so good and anyway I had always been destined for Hell, but in the meantime it was so good to finally be with her, in her, part of her, just like our voices melting into one voice and then my body was out of my control, moving in a way I didn't command and it frightened me but not enough to stop and not even her gasp was enough to make me stop and I couldn't see her anyway, nothing but an almost (but not quite) painful blaze and then nothing, blackness, and as I dropped into it I wondered if she had killed me at last.


	3. Chapter 3

I wasn't dead. Again. I could feel her hands pushing at me, and I opened my eyes to find myself still on top of her. I smiled, and I started to say something, anything, like "I never thought I could feel like this" or "I love you" or even "Thank you" but there were tears in her eyes, and tracks of them on her cheeks and I realized how heavy I must be. I pulled away from her and she gasped again, biting her lip to muffle the sound. I felt suddenly, awkwardly modest, but I looked down at her anyway, to where—Oh God, there was blood. No one had told me there would be blood. She was human after all was my first thought, and my second was to draw her into my arms, cradle her against me. I was sobbing now, tears splashing down my sunken cheeks onto her hair.

"Christine, my love, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't know. Please believe me, I didn't know. I never meant to hurt you. I'd sooner kill myself than hurt you. I never should have… you should have said… Oh my God Christine what can I do? Tell me? What did I do?"

She was gripping my arm now, her eyes suddenly dry, that odd resolve appearing in her expression again. "Hush, Erik. It's alright. I'm alright. I… I heard… I mean…" She blushed. "The girls said the first time, you…" She couldn't finish. She was still trembling slightly. "You really didn't know that?" she asked timidly.

I shook my head. "No. I never… My God, Christine, look at me. No woman's ever…"

"Did I please you?" she asked, lowering her eyes from me, staring at the sheet next to her.

"How could hurting you please me?" I asked, appalled.

"No, not that. Before, when you… you looked strange. I've never seen you look like that. Did I hurt you too?"

Already the shame seemed to be melting away, like my resolve. "No, my dear. Far from it. I cannot tell you what a gift you've given me. But I can't bear the thought of having hurt you. Or hurting you again. We don't have to do this, you know. You understand, don't you?"

She shook her head. "It's my duty. As… as your wife. I know we can't be married, Erik, but I chose to be your wife. And Raoul told me a wife's duty is to… to her husband." She still wasn't looking at me.

"It shouldn't be a duty to be my husband, Christine," I replied almost automatically. Normally, the mention of the vicomte would have sent me into paroxysms of jealousy, but what I felt now was, for the first time, a real superiority where Christine was concerned. Her first. I had claimed her first, irrevocably, for all time, mine. The boy no longer mattered, and I had proof. Even if she ran back to him tomorrow, I would still have that. Not that I was going to let that happen.

I looked back down her form as she lay stiffly in my arms. A woman, then. Not a doll. Not a statue. The blood… the blood only marked her as mine. "Let's get you cleaned up, then," I said softly. I felt calm now, more relaxed than I had been in years, but that feeling was already beginning to dissipate. There were things I had to think about, things I had to remember. But I had to take care of her first.

I carried her, unresisting, to the bathroom and drew her a bath. She didn't seem to be injured in any way, so I merely washed away the blood. It was such an intimate act but she seemed to have reverted to a doll-like trance I recognized from what seemed like a former life, before she knew me, before I was anything but an angel or demon or both to her. Now that I was a man, it should be different. I would make it different, I promised her silently. There had to be a way to make it different. "I love you, Christine," I told her.

She looked up at me then and smiled wanly. "I love you too, Erik."

My stomach did a childish somersault but I merely touched the side of her face. I wouldn't let her see me cry, not again, but I felt my eyes filling with tears. Such simple words (and what were words, anyway?) but they had such power. "Should I leave you be for a while? Will you be alright?"

She nodded. "Of course."

"I'd like for us to have a nice dinner tonight. To… to celebrate."

"I'd like that."

After changing the sheets, I shut the door to her bedroom and leaned against it for a moment. So that was it. Such a silly thing, when you thought about it, but I'd been chasing it all my life it seemed and it was almost unbelievable that I'd finally caught up. I had not expected to feel this… frightened. My mind went back over events. I had silently accused Christine of acting like a doll whose mechanism has wound down, but I was the automaton. Was it always like that, frantic and unconscious? Was I no better than an animal? I had thought to experience something divine and blissful. I had blissful, had the feeling of it still suffusing my body, but divine?

I went into my study. It was darker there, the walls hung with tapestries and drapes, and the familiar surroundings calmed me somewhat. I had to think this through. I had to understand what had happened, what I had felt. I had the rather comic thought of asking the daroga for advice.

And then I laughed at myself. What had thinking to do with any of this? What divine? The only divinity I believed in was beauty, and here I was worrying about my spiritual being when two rooms away there lay a creature who took away thought better than any drug or music or death. Here I was worrying about losing control when I knew quite well I'd been raving for years. So I had lost control. So I did not understand what I had felt. It had felt good. More than good; I hadn't words for that too-fleeting sensation.

But I didn't need words. I had the memory, and I replayed it again and again, the skin, the flesh, the blood. Even thinking about it seemed like too much, like even the shadowy touch of the memory was more sensation than I'd ever been allowed in my long life. She had no idea, I thought. She had no idea what she'd done for me.

I roused myself. She would be hungry, I thought. Unless… unless I had disgusted her. I had not thought of that. No, I wouldn't. She had made her choice, and she must have thought it through. If she hadn't (as, I feared, was more likely), she ought to have. She hadn't flinched from me. She had absolved me of any wrongdoing. It followed then that she must be hungry.

I realized I would have to go out soon. There had been little to eat in the house to begin with, and the past week or two of derangement and grief had let spoil most of what had been here. I didn't want to leave her alone right now, though. I managed to find some tins I'd secured away for an emergency, and decided that with enough spices the various barely-recognizable substances would taste fine. To me anyway. I would go shopping tomorrow.

It struck me that I really did not know what Christine was thinking now. Things had been simpler before. Not better, simpler. I hesitated outside her door, feeling a strange propriety despite the lowering of that last barrier mere hours ago. I didn't know what I would find inside, I didn't know if she would shout or cry or fall into my arms. I didn't know what I'd entered into. But I wouldn't have traded this day for all the celibate years she might have been willing to give me. Even if this day was the last.

"Christine? Are you… are you decent?" Decent… neither of us would ever be decent again, no matter how many layers of clothing we covered ourselves in, no matter if we never spoke of this day. Only the ignorant were ever decent.

There was a muffled sound I took for assent and I opened the door. "I've made us some dinner. You must be famished." She was standing in front of the open door of the wardrobe, staring into the mirror which hung there. I had not been able to bring myself to put a mirror over her dressing table, despite my promise that the room was hers and hers alone, but I knew no woman would dress without one. In the wardrobe, I supposed, I would not have to encounter it. Now the mask I wore floated above her shoulder, like an imp whispering things in her ear, and there was no angel on the other side. I wondered what she had been looking at, because to me she looked more beautiful than ever. Just knowing, at last, what secrets had been hidden from me made her even more alluring, even when they had been covered again.

I felt a rush of tenderness at seeing her again, and a sense of wonder again at how this creature was mine at last. It didn't seem real. She didn't seem real. But what I had experienced in her arms was. She turned and her eyes seemed to be searching my face, only I didn't have one, and she dropped them, suddenly shy.

"Erik."

"Did you have a relaxing afternoon?" She nodded. "Are you hungry?" She paused, then nodded again. She was a delicate woman, but the way she was able to pack away food spoke volumes about her wandering, uncertain childhood. I presented my arm and she took it, finally smiling up at me. A tension I hadn't noticed before melted away. "I'm afraid it isn't much, but it was the best I could do with what I have here. I'll have to restock tomorrow." The Opera usually had food at the ready for use by the managers, visiting dignitaries, and the teas and dinner parties thrown for important patrons.

"I'm certain it's good, Erik. You always took good care of me."

"And I always will, Christine. You won't want for anything." She would be happy here, if I had to rob the Opera blind to see to it.

We sat and I watched her push her food around her plate for a few minutes before she decided she was hungry. I wondered how she felt, if she was sore, but I didn't know how to ask a question like that. I didn't know how it all worked, but my impression was that there wasn't a specified length of time one had to allow between these things. I knew I wanted her again, even so soon. I could barely eat for thinking about her.

"Were you happy with me today, Erik?" she asked, and I felt heat rising to my cheeks.

"Christine, I… you…" What a thing for her to ask! I didn't know whether to be embarrassed or grateful or—

"My voice," she cut in insistently. "How did I sound? I know it's been a few days, Erik, but I'm sure I haven't forgotten anything." Her eyes implored me, but I was a little confused, the train of my thoughts obviously having taken an alternate track than hers. Mine must have had a little too much coal added to the furnace, because in my head the dishes were cleared and the table was empty except for her.

"You sounded beautiful," I said, then realized she was probably looking for more than that. Her angel of music, dispensing his divine wisdom. "A little shaky on the low notes; you have to pay as much attention to those as the high ones, you can't just toss them off because they're not as difficult." She nodded, waiting. Frankly, I could hardly remember the specifics-subsequent events had thrown my thoughts into a welcome jumble of feelings and images. "Ah… you have to listen to what you are saying, the words. The music goes a long way, but the words are important too. Even if no one understands them, you must be able to convey exactly what the character is feeling. No one should have to hear the words, if you sing them properly. We'll work on it, my dear." She nodded again and I knew she was filing away everything I'd said. If I was going to teach her anything, I'd have to be more objective. I had been, up until now. I'd drilled her like an army sergeant. My brain was overloaded with her, intoxicated. I was, at this point, horribly biased.

It was a rather frightening thought, really. When had anything come between me and music? When had anything disturbed my objectivity? Even my first obsession with her I could put down to some ability to see her potential before anyone else. And that had come true. But had it all been an excuse to begin with? I wasn't certain anymore. The way my body had reacted to her, the way I had lost all mastery of myself, the way I could even now smell her and feel her all over—could those things really have sprung from a purely impartial observation of her musical promise?

We rose from the table, but I didn't know what happened next. I knew I could not have what I most wanted, not so soon. It was similar to the torture I'd endured for the past months, having her here but so far away at the same time, but it was different now that I knew what I'd been missing, what I now had. I didn't know if it was better or worse but it was both more subtle and more demanding, more urgent and yet not, because she was here, she was mine, and there was nothing to keep me from her anymore.

Reading. I could read something, get my mind off of it, or at least fool my mind into thinking it was thinking about something else. I selected a book at random from the shelves which lined the walls of the sitting room and sat in the armchair. "Do you have something you can do, my darling?" She nodded and went to the piano, selecting the _Aida_ score and settling down with it spread across her lap on the sofa. I pretended to read as she pored over it intently, her face a study in concentration. I smiled to myself. How different she was now from that timid, listless girl she'd been when we met. She'd wanted something then, but she hadn't know how to get it, and hadn't wanted it badly enough to find out. I'd made her want it. I'd made her want me.

Or at least if she didn't, not in the way I wanted her, then I'd made her feel something for me. Even if it wasn't love, pity strong enough to bring her back had to strike a similar chord, even if the timbre was slightly different. The ear could learn to accommodate many things.

And I could make her want me. Tomorrow, I would start.

Christine was yawning now, hiding it politely behind her hand. "Go to bed, love." She looked up, flushing slightly. "It's been a tiring day for you, I imagine." Not tiring. Invigorating, life-giving, soul-confusing perhaps. And another question presented itself now: were we to share a bed, as I supposed a true married couple was wont? I remembered my mother's large bed, although my parents had had separate bedrooms. Such a bed was a bit of a waste for just one. My own seemed suddenly cold and lonely—more lonely even than the rather spare life I'd built for myself before Christine would suggest. My house was an homage to erratic and rather uncomfortable genius, and the fixtures followed suit.

Suddenly, erratic and uncomfortable did not seem all that appealing.

"Christine," I breathed. I could barely form the words, my chest in the same vice grip I had felt when asking her to choose between those blasted insects.

"Yes, Erik?" She had stood and now took a step towards me.

"Christine, I…" Oh, how did one say this? I had not asked her earlier, I had kissed her and carried her off like a savage in a cave, but I could not just follow her into her bedroom and watch her undress and slide into bed with her without comment. It wasn't unpremeditated passion, but rather the most domestic of gestures. A symbol of the normal life I craved. I wasn't used to asking for it. I had always either taken or tried to reconcile myself to never having things. "Christine, I want to sleep with you, like a husband and wife, like… I want to wake up and know you are here with me." I held my breath for what seemed like hours but was probably for her merely a dramatic pause.

A nod. A slightly forced smile. "You are my husband, Erik. I am your wife. If you… if you will give me a minute to dress, I… I want this to work, Erik. I'm going to make it work."


	4. Chapter 4

I could not sleep. Christine, always more trusting than she ought, had fallen asleep almost immediately after kissing me goodnight. It was a wonder, really. How could she be so easy in bed with me? How could this make so little difference to her, when I lay awake in confusion and wonder and gratitude? I could see her even now, even in the dark and under the covers I could watch the quilt move with her breath. I wanted to soak up every inch of her. I wanted to be filled with her, with her scent, which to my confounded olfactory sense mostly brought up phantom memories of my mother's rose garden after dark, the only time I was allowed outside. I hated those roses then for looking lovely and hiding their sins, which was the same reason that I envied them.

I was beyond such envy now. Or so I told myself. Why should I feel envious when I had everything I'd always wanted? Well, within reason, at any rate. Perhaps in another hundred years medical science would progress to the point where I could have been fixed, or not born at all, for that matter.

Reason! Nothing about Christine and me and the whole situation had anything to do with reason. I didn't know why she had come back, not really, but I didn't care and I didn't question it. My love for her was not reasonable. Nothing about how I felt for her was, except perhaps her training, and even that had fallen by the wayside. But it didn't matter. All that mattered was that she was here with me and that she would stay forever. Like mummies, entombed in a sort of underworld heaven in eternal (somewhat) youthful damnation. I wanted to enter into her and never have to leave. If she were to devour me there would be no telling where one of us ended and the other began. Perhaps the only way to be made beautiful by her kiss, like the cursed princes in stories, was to become her. I had never been allowed to take communion but I imagined my flesh transubstantiating into hers, or vice versa. It really didn't matter. All that mattered was that she was here and that nothing, nothing would separate us.

Never had mind and body been so in tune, I thought. Never had my thoughts and my physical needs been so exactly the same. I hungered for her now, restraint all the more difficult with her lying, so trusting, next to me. I had hungered before, but now it was the hunger of a feral cat who had tasted cream and could no longer subsist on water. And once you feed a cat, you know, it is yours forever. Nothing you can do will rid you of it.

I watched her breathe, not dead, not a ghost or a phantom but mine all the same. Didn't that make restraint unnecessary? A foolish, gentlemanly gesture of the sort I had no claim to. And no reason to regain, either, since we were married. I could watch her all I wanted. I could lift the quilt from her body and examine her curves as they swelled under her nightdress, a frothy, insubstantial thing that I could rip without even waking her. I could trace her body with my eyes, hands, mouth, as rude and unpleasant as they were. There were none to stop me, least of all her, who had given her word, given her self to me. I wanted to give myself to her again. My body, whose newly awakened state had taught me to consider my previous condition as mere sleepwalking, ached for her. "Lust" would have to be redefined in my personal dictionary.

She turned slightly away from me, as if sensible of my gaze, and I was treated with a view of the slight, boyish curve of her hip tapering to leg. Legs. As much as they might try to deny it, women had legs, and skin and buttocks and breasts and other, more secret things, hidden even when all else was laid bare. Even those lovely trouser roles I'd seen her perform were no comparison to this. Through some inhuman effort I made myself merely watch her, falling, eventually, into a restful sleep that was nonetheless filled with visions of her. My imagination had been given more to work with, and where before my dreams had been abstract and basic now my architect's mind had the materials for more advanced projects, and she did things to me I feared I would only ever encounter while asleep.

I awoke with a start, my body straining for her but the object of my passion lying, for all intents and purposes, dead to the world. There was a furious knocking coming from somewhere in the house and my first frantic thought was that her little hero had come flouncing down here to see if his luck would hold a second time. So be it, I thought. I'd given him fair warning, which was actually more than he should expect from a monster like me, wasn't it? I glanced back at Christine, sleeping oblivious through the racket, and smiled. Not a monster. Not anymore. She would wake to find me gone, but I wondered if, for an instant, she might think me an invisible, godly lover. Would she bring a lamp to bed tonight, and would she shudder at what its light revealed?

My mind was wandering again, but I collected myself and my clothes and went out to kill the gallant knight. The torture chamber was a bit slow for my taste now, and didn't give me the pleasure of being the actual instrument of death. Perhaps, this time, I should resort to my bare hands. True, it had been many years since I'd sunk so low, but this was a personal matter. Strangling was so much more intimate when you could feel your victim convulsing for air under your fingers.

I wouldn't kill him in my own house. It might upset Christine, and besides, it hadn't been easy to buy and steal all of those rugs and things and I may find that a certain amount of blood was necessary. I flicked the complicated locking mechanism without thinking and glanced through the one-way spy-hole.

The daroga. That foolish old man. My disappointment was almost crushing. I supposed I could kill him, but it seemed a little indecent, despite all the threats I'd made to him over the years. Or perhaps because of them. One could only threaten a painful death so many times before it became something of an endearment. I opened the door just wide enough to slip through and the door was closed again before he could raise his arm to knock.

"I thought I told you not to come back."

"And I thought you were dead," he said with that infuriating equanimity. You'd think the man had no emotions at all, that he was constructed entirely of moral scruples. "I was going to come back and bury you, but a funny thing happened."

"I lived," I suggested. And for the first time in as long as I could remember, I rejoiced in that fact. I'd felt such kinship with death for so long that I had forgotten that life, too, could bring power.

"No," he replied, and fixed me with a look that said my living was about to become anything but a laughing matter. "I'll go along with your pose of ignorance for a moment, if it amuses you. Christine's disappeared."

Damn him. Of course he'd notice a thing like that. He was worse than an old woman. "That's hardly surprising. She's engaged to that heroic little example of petty nobility, isn't she? Perhaps they got tired of waiting and ran off."

"That would most likely require the groom's presence. I don't suppose I need tell you he has not disappeared. And before you ask, I did not bring him with me." I wondered how he was able to read a blank mask so well. It was disconcerting. I really ought to have killed him years ago. "I knew how you'd react."

"What makes you think I won't kill you?" I asked.

"Leave off, Erik. I know you have her. She disappeared the night before last, after a quarrel with the boy. He won't tell me about what, only that he's convinced you're dead but still haunting her somehow. I convinced him not to come down here. I told him I only knew the one way, and that last I knew it was sealed for good, because of the water. I don't know how long it will hold him." He paused, and when he spoke again his voice was lower, pained. "I thought better of you, Erik. After she… after you let them go. I thought I could expect better of you."

"Better, daroga? Such as laying down my life for love like a poor dog in the street? Finally redeeming my blackened soul with my broken heart? I expected better from you, daroga. Though you always did have more imagination than was good for a policeman. Either that, or you've seen too many operas."

"You lost, Erik. Chagny won. You've tried this once, it didn't work. Give it up. Give her up. It will be better for both of you if you let her live her own life and let her out of yours. Stop torturing yourself."

I wanted to scream my triumph in his face. I wanted to tell him that he was right, she was here, but of her own free will. That she had chosen and chosen me, my living bride, my own Aida. That I _had _won and I _was _saved and he ought to think better of me, because I was a changed man, whole, human, good, insofar as was in my power. Her power. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"The hell you don't!" he exclaimed, surprising me. He hardly ever swore. "How many times must we have this conversation? I don't even know why I bother, Erik. I should let him just come down here and do what he will, except I know it would end in his death and this time someone might notice. Let me see her, at least. Let me talk to her."

"She's not here. Leave me alone." I wanted to tell him she was sleeping, describe to him how beautiful she was in repose, unmoving, barely breathing. I wanted to tell him what had happened yesterday, what she'd given to me. I had so many questions. "You're not welcome anymore, daroga. You betrayed me to him."

"You tried to kill me!"

"By your vigorous knocking I'd say you've recovered. I've nothing more to say to you. You should have known, anyway, daroga. Your faith in me has always been a bit insane, if you ask me. Wishful thinking at best." Oh but his faith was completely vindicated now, and I couldn't even tell him.

"As you should have known what I would do, Erik. You should have seen it coming. I'm not blind, and neither are you. Neither of us has any illusions about the other." Then why wasn't one of us dead? I wanted to ask. If we were both so perceptive, why had neither of us foreseen Christine coming back? If that could happen, anything could, and I knew nothing at all.

"Then be grateful for the insanity that keeps me from killing you," said, and slipped back inside, locking the door.

"You wouldn't have to if you had nothing to hide!" he called through the door. I watched him as he gazed speculatively at the door, his eyes unerringly finding the hidden spy-hole. His lantern illuminated him from below, deepening the lines on his face, so it may have been my imagination that supplied the tiny, brief smile on his face as he turned away.


	5. Chapter 5

"Who were you talking to?" I turned slowly, not wanting to display surprise. I'd gotten too worked up over his visit. Christine stood in the doorway, dressed in an elaborate dressing gown I had trouble distinguishing from day-wear. Perhaps there were undergarment concerns which differentiated the two.

"No one, my dear." Realizing that it was not in my best interest for her to believe I spoke to the air on a regular basis, I relented. "My friend, the Persian gentleman I'm sure you're acquainted with."

She shivered a little. "Oh. He makes me nervous. All that sneaking about. Everyone thinks he's mad."

"The daroga is a very old friend of mine. He's the sanest person I know. And he saved your boy's life. You might want to remember that." Her eyes widened and I realized I'd been speaking to her in that cold, demonic voice I usually reserved for her ex-fiancé. Why was I so ready to leap to that nosy little snoop's defense? Technically, Christine had saved Chagny. "But that's all done now, isn't it?" I said with false heartiness.

She nodded. "I'm sorry, Erik, I didn't think. I'm grateful to him, of course." Not too grateful, I hoped, though I supposed I couldn't fault her for not wanting her lover dead. As long as she never thought about him again. "He just… frightens me sometimes, when I see him in the halls. He asked me all sorts of questions. He was so odd. He's your friend?" Her brows furrowed slightly in thought.

Odd. He frightened her with his oddness, and here I was, a creature from a nightmare sharing her bed. "I am capable of basic human relationships, however my current lifestyle may deceive you."

"Of course," she said automatically. "I didn't mean… Only that you were going to kill him."

"It's complicated, Christine," I said, suddenly tired of the conversation. Well, it didn't matter to me what she thought of him, did it? It didn't change the fact of her presence. I walked towards her, willing my irritation away. It fled before the sight of her, all rose and marble and gold wrapped in sapphire. "Did you sleep well, love?"

She nodded. "You?"

She had no idea, had she? So innocent, so innocent, like me only I had never been innocent, not to mother and not to God and not to myself, no matter how virtuous I wanted to be. In this moment, I wanted her innocence so badly, so fiercely but that was rather a contradiction, wasn't it? Could this feeling have anything to do with purity? But she had caused it, so it must be good. I realized I was staring at her wordlessly. "It was… wonderful," I said finally. Let her think I reposed chastely at her side like a saint testing his faith, the way I imagined she thought Chagny would. Let her think what she would, if only I could be there again.

"I'm hungry, Erik. Would you like me to make something?" I didn't want to eat, foolish girl! But reason spoke and lust gave over reluctantly. People needed food. There was none left in the house. There was nothing for it but to go for provisions.

"That would be lovely. Unfortunately, I seem to have forgotten to go shopping while I was waiting to die. Don't frown so, it was merely a joke." Obviously I was a better music teacher than comedian. "Do you think you can find something to do while you wait for me, love?" She nodded. "I won't be gone long, I promise. Is there anything in particular you would like?"

"Chocolate," she said decisively. I ought to have guessed. It never changed. Her dear Papa hadn't been able to afford sweets, or some nonsense, so now she had an uncontrollable sweet tooth.

"Very well. I will dress and then I'll be back before you know it."

In my room I bathed and dressed hurriedly. I didn't want to leave her, even for the short amount of time it would take. I had refined my shopping trips to a science over the years. I could but rarely go out into the markets to get my supplies, and I could not trust anyone to do it for me. Luckily, the Opera always had more than enough to go around and even the current management of "efficiency" was not capable of keeping track of it all. As far as I knew, they didn't even miss anything. Not that it would have made any difference if they had.

It was early, and the Opera was more or less deserted. There was almost always someone around, but it was a large building and at the moment the pantries were devoid of workers. I slipped in and was about to make off with my usual supplies when something made me pause. Christine did not deserve to live on the same meager fare as I was used to, since at this point food was merely a matter of staying alive. She deserved better, and I remembered how I'd plied her with delicacies in an attempt to win her over like a stray cat. No reason to cease doing so merely because I had succeeded. I found myself poring over the stores, mentally concocting recipes and novelties from other lands as I gathered my plunder.

And then, I thought, should I not bring her back something else? A wedding present perhaps, a token of my gratitude, as insufficient as such a thing must be. There were always plenty of unused bits and pieces lying about the upper cellars, and I began trolling through them. She had gowns and costumes and her beauty needed no jewelry, though I supposed women liked that sort of thing. She liked music, but I could give her that on my own. And then, behind a larger backdrop I found it: a small country scene painted on canvas. It must have been meant for a smaller venue, for it was about the size of a wall in Christine's bedroom and was too detailed to be useful from a distance. It was fine work, really. And it would remind her of her youth, the farms and villages she'd told me of. It would remind her of the daylight she had relinquished with her promise to be my wife. It would have to be enough.

It took me some time to wrestle the blasted thing downstairs and into the house. I heard Christine moving about in another room, so I did not announce my presence but instead unfolded the unwieldy thing into place along one bare wall. It was almost an exact fit. There was no need to go outside now, was there? She had everything she could want right here. I stared at the new wall for a moment, immensely pleased with myself. It could not have been more perfect if I had painted it myself; indeed, though it pained me to say it, I had so rarely been outdoors the past few years that I had forgotten what a field full of sun looked like. Surely no sky could capture the exact color of her eyes, nor grass the golden glow of her hair, but here it was. Christine as landscape.

"Christine?" I pitched my voice to carry but not startle. I wanted to show her my gift, wanted her to be as giddily pleased with me as I myself was. I set down the bag of groceries in the kitchen.

"I'm in here." What she was doing in my study I had no idea, but I didn't care for the moment. "Erik, I— "

"Come out here. I have something to show you." I was jittery with impatience.

She came into the parlor and smiled. "A present?" she asked. "Where?"

"After you, madame." She giggled, I supposed because no one had ever called her that before. And then she walked into her room and her smile seemed to match the bright, artificial day she gazed at.

"It's beautiful, Erik. It reminds me of a place Papa and I used to… Oh, it's lovely." She turned to me and I entered the room. "Did you paint it?"

Her blind faith in my skills sometimes begged to be taken advantage of, but I declined. "I'm afraid not. But do you like it?"

"Yes, of course. It's wonderful. It makes the room seem like it belongs somewhere else." Somewhere else. Not these dark, dank, tomb-like catacombs. Well, it couldn't be helped. I knew she was a creature from above. She frowned slightly. "But where did you get it?"

"It was just waiting for us, love. With the scenery."

"Oh. But isn't that… well it doesn't belong to us, does it?"

I sighed. Where did she think any of this came from? My lucrative position as bank president? Didn't she know that everything in the entire Opera was mine, including but not limited to her? "If you want to get technical, no, I suppose not. But it's not being used, and it hasn't been for some time. It's not as if I removed it from the building, is it? Honestly darling, you have some of the most naive ideas."

She bit her lip slightly as she focused her eyes on mine and I felt myself falling into the sky. I had no need for the outdoors. She aroused my desire for the sun and satisfied it simultaneously. "I know I'm not worldly like some of the other girls. Or clever like you are. I know enough to know I'm a simple, stupid girl. Don't hate me for that, Erik."

I wanted to shake her for dismissing herself so lightly. "God no, Christine. No. Don't ever lament your innocence. It's a valuable thing. You can never counterfeit that. I love you for it." She was standing so close. I felt like I had been in chains for the last twenty four hours or so, and self-imposed at that. "Among other things." I deserved a reward for all this needless restraint. Sainthood, perhaps: Saint Erik, patron of sexually impoverished madmen everywhere. Though I'd wager my piano and Christine both that no one would put my statue in a church. I'd settle for a shrine in the basement, though. Her face was closed to me as I drew nearer, and I was left wondering what she was thinking or remembering. I had hurt her, I knew that much. But I'd heard enough talk from behind the walls of the dancers' dressing room to know that it wasn't all hurt. It would be illogical at best for women to have been created without the ability to experience pleasure at procreation, whatever the priests wanted everyone to think. A biological paradox. Yesterday had been about me—that I admitted. Today I hoped that I could make her interests and mine not so different from one another.

"Did… did you want me to take off my clothes?" she asked. Ah, but she learned quickly.

"Would you like to?" Did it make a difference?

She blushed. "It's not proper to discuss such things, Erik. Please. Just tell me what to do." She sounded so lost and young. A child in school who desperately wanted to please her teacher but didn't understand the purpose of multiplication. Which I couldn't remember right now either.

I went to turn off the electric light and lit a candle. I'd diverted power from city lines some time ago and in tinkering with the lighting had found a way to adjust the brightness, but electric just didn't seem the right mood. Candles would offer both romance and dimness; there was no sense making her look at any more of me than she absolutely had to. I was willing to make it easier for her. When I turned back, she hadn't moved. Good God, she wouldn't until I said something, would she? I wondered if it followed then that she would do anything I said. But that little hypothesis would have to wait until later; I was tired of talking.

She didn't resist as I began pulling at her dress. Desire pulled at me but I kept it at bay and managed all the buttons this time. I kept my own clothes on, mask included. They could wait. I could wait. Perhaps. When she was clad only in her white underthings, I led her to the bed and made her sit on the edge while I continued. I knelt before her, and where before I had bypassed all detours in favor of my goal this time I let my hands trail up her legs, the stockings soft to the touch but in the way. I removed each offending piece of clothing, making sure my hands followed where once there had been fabric. I felt paralyzed with nerves. What if she rejected me? What if I could not give her pleasure? What was I doing here?

I was here now, however, and I had to make the attempt. Mouth followed hands. When my lips reached her breast (so different from the cold, marble variety which had been all I was allowed previously) she seemed to break out of her trance. "Erik, what are you…" I didn't want her to talk, to ruin this, so I silenced her by moving my hand to the place I wanted the most, the place that now occupied my dreams where before I'd had only vague impressions of her skin and hair and voice. Silenced she was not, but the little gasp, unintended and quickly swallowed as it was, was enough to propel me into my own pursuit. It was all very well, this feasting and fondling, but I wanted something else and suddenly it seemed I would die if I did not have it.

It was different this time. Something had changed. Oh it was beautiful still, Heaven in heat and touch, but she was different. Her eyes opened wide in surprise at first, but then they closed and I watched her face but I didn't know what exactly I saw there and then it didn't matter because all at once I seemed to leave my body, coming to rest finally at her side, exhausted, sated, and happier than I had been in my life. I hardly recognized the feeling.

I opened my eyes to find hers still shut. A light sweat had broken out on her face and I touched her cheek tentatively with my fingers. "Are you well, child?" I asked. "Did I hurt you?"

A blush suffused her cheek as I stroked it. "No. Yes. I… No, Erik. I'm fine." She opened her eyes and turned away as she rose, clutching at her robe as if my eyes were somehow more invasive than what she'd allowed mere seconds ago. "I'd like to take a bath now, if you don't mind." Her voice trembled slightly.

I sat up. "What happened? Christine, speak to me."

"Nothing." She turned to me and smiled and touched the mask I had forgotten to take off. "I just want to bathe now."

Perhaps it was a woman thing. Cleanliness. Perhaps it had some biological purpose. I nodded as if I understood. "Of course. I'll be working, if you need me."

Working. I hadn't worked in weeks, probably. I realized, upon dressing and leaving her room, that I desperately wanted something to do. Yesterday I had been awash with new sensations and had only been able to concentrate on the awkward jumble of thoughts and feelings and memories. Today I felt the need to put them to use, put them on paper. Don Juan, triumphant indeed. At last I could finish my opus. I finally knew what it meant.

The manuscript lay on the desk in my study, and I flipped through it curiously. The whole thing was more a chronicle of my emotional journey than a cohesive narrative; the title was really only a feeble attempt at self-irony. I recognized in the childish dots and lines my naiveté, then my frustration, and finally a violent lust that looking back suddenly seemed only half the story. I'd wanted her so badly, so blindly. Not even knowing what it was I was looking for. I carried it out to the piano to attempt to capture between those five lines what I now knew. As if that were possible; I had been callow indeed to think that all that fire and passion and skin and blood could be contained in ink, no matter how red. Better just to play it, let the music take over. Tenderly at first, I recounted her return, my awakening, her sleeping form. Tenderly I meant to recreate our first union, and it started that way but my hands began to move swiftly across the keys, unconsciously finding a tempo and rhythm I had not instructed, had no control over. Music pulsed around me, inside me, and I could only wonder what Christine was thinking in her bath. Did she recognize this for what it was? Did she feel it too? Or was I alone in this unfamiliar territory, this oasis in half a century's worth of desert?

I recalled the first time I'd played like this with her in the house. Then, I had been attempting to keep the lust at bay, knowing I would not be received and not able to bear the thought of her disgusted reaction. She had not been affected by it then, instead revealing an audacity that seemed out of character until you had observed her over time. Like the moon, she revealed herself in pieces. But then, perhaps she was not as wholly unaffected by the music as I had previously thought. What was her removal of my mask but a completion of the confession I'd begun by pouring my passion into the air? In some subtle way, I'd asked for it. Perhaps I had even wanted her to see me, on some level. I remembered how angry I'd been at her. Uncontrollable rage, which I could still recognize as belonging to me but could no longer understand. I could not imagine being so cruel to her, although the memory of it remained fresh. It had taken every mental trick of control I had ever learned to keep from killing her that day. Killing her! My angel, my salvation, maestro and author of all that was good within me. Tears streamed down my face as I continued to play, the violence gone, leaving only the hope I felt as I mapped out our future together in ascending arpeggios and major chords.

When my hands finally came to rest on the keys, the last few notes fading into the walls around me, I was startled by a hand on my shoulder. "You should take that off," she said.

"What?" I couldn't remember who she was at first. Christine. I blinked at her stupidly. I'd forgotten she was in the house.

"The mask. You'll suffocate." She was right. The tears were trapped between my face and the mask, where my nose ought to be. It was embarrassing, being reminded like this, by she who I would rather not know of the mundane yet grotesque details of my existence. Sometimes I longed for the days when I was her angel, as grand and untouchable to her as she was to me. She loved me then, I knew. After a fashion, anyway. She'd promised me everything, given her soul to a voice and a fantasy. But I was not a voice or a fantasy. I had a body, as did she, and I had not been content with merely her soul. Souls were nothing, I had learned. It was the body that made you what you were, that dictated what and who you could have or not.

Ridiculous. I had no desire to be untouchable, not now that I had learned that touch could bring something other than pain. Or at least that the pain brought by desire was not an end unto itself but a beginning. I wondered if any touch would ever be enough, or if one day I would burn so hot that we'd both disintegrate into ash, mingling and finally inseparable. Until then, I would take what I could get. Like now, as she eased the mask off my face and produced a tiny, nearly transparent handkerchief. I let her do it this time, did not explode into a rage of betrayal and injured pride but leaned into her touch. "I'm sorry, Christine," I said. "I'm sorry this is all I am." I recalled her words to her boy lover, on the roof, initially forgotten in favor of the more pressing matter of their planned elopement. Misery was always more occupying than good, and made for a better story. _If he was handsome, what then?_ he'd asked, like most innocents not appreciating the value of his ignorance. What was it she'd said? A sin at the back of her mind? Was that what I was?

A tiny line had settled between her brows, like she was working something out. I could always tell. "You're a genius," she said with utmost, blind sincerely. "You're my husband. You're my angel of music. Don't you remember?" This was enough for her, she seemed to be trying to say, so it better damn well be enough for me. "The rest… the rest is just circumstance." Circumstance. As if she would ever have used that word before we'd met.

_If he was a genius, Christine, what then?_ The thought came unbidden. What if circumstance had given Chagny just an ounce of creativity? Or a face like mine; who, then, would deserve her salvation more?

Well. It just went to show how much circumstance was worth. I was here now, after all, in spite of Fate and God and every circumstance either could wield.

"Thank you, my dove," I said. Sometimes I envied the way everything seemed to be so simple for her. Distilled into a formula and followed without doubt. "If you don't mind, I'd like to write this down." It wasn't strictly necessary to write down everything that I came up with, but it was a habit I'd gotten into. One had to maintain a certain amount of discipline, even if the promise of my day in the sun as most celebrated composer in the world seemed dimmer and dimmer every year.

She nodded. "It sounded good," she said. I watched her walk away to sit on the sofa with a book. She'd never really mentioned my music before, not in any qualitative way, even in such amateurish terms as "good." What was good about it? I wanted to ask. What did you hear?

But I was a genius. I didn't require accolades or her approval; I created for the sake of creation. So I did not ask her, but bent to my task. I had to let my mind recreate what my fingers had. Usually the notes flowed, awkward but swift, onto the page almost as quickly as into the air, but I was having trouble paying attention to them. Little things kept distracting me: the rustle of her skirts, the unconscious tapping of her fingers on the cover of her book, and finally, when she got bored, the roaming path she began around the room. Every third note was interrupted somehow and I felt the wild inspiration of my playing slipping away from me. That was an insufferable thought. It was one area I would not relinquish control of.

"Must you do that?" I asked and wished my voice had chosen a slightly less acidic tone to represent me in. She looked up from the books she was rearranging, evening out the spines.

"I just thought—"

I waved a hand at her. "I need to work, Christine. Please, just go… do… something." I was at a loss as to what, but she was a grown woman. Surely she could do that much for herself. She frowned at me, a girlish little pout that in other circumstances would cause me to melt with desire and repentance, but I had things to do, and at any rate now she was gone and I could concentrate.

She'd closed the door behind her and there was silence in the room but for the scratching of my pen. I could let my mind wander a little now. I wondered how much blood it would have taken to write out this score. I supposed you could only use a little bit at a time, unless I mixed in some anti-coagulate or maybe kept the blood cold. Would blood be fresher if it was stored cold? On the other hand, what practical difference was there between blood and the red ink which imitated it?

Every difference and none. That was what I'd learned in my life. Which made it sound like something of a waste.

I lost track of time as I scribbled away, involved completely in what I was doing, only coming back to myself at a discrete knock on the door. "Erik? I've made us something to eat. You must be hungry."

Hungry? I wasn't sure. Without anyone here all these years, things like time and hunger had become irrelevant. When I wished to know what was occurring above, I could check the clock or venture forth to find out. But I remembered that other people ate at regular intervals. Mealtimes were a purely human invention, of no practical use in survivalist terms. But then, I supposed I could not hold myself completely outside the human race anymore. Some things I would have to accede to.

She opened the door. Her dress was different; perhaps women had particular clothes for cooking. "Please come eat, Erik."

"Of course," I said automatically, trying to shake myself back into conversational mode. "How kind of you to cook, Christine." She'd never offered that before, either, and it was touching, as much an acceptance of her life here as her body's acceptance of me as her husband. I wondered how I could have forgotten about her for so long, however long I'd been working. Hunger would not have reminded me; I had no desire for food, not with her around. She walked in front of me the short distance to the table and I could not help but envision her bent across it. There were so many things I didn't know, hadn't done and I was afraid lest this end before I accomplished them all.

I drew my eye back to the dishes she was proudly displaying and refrained from asking what it was. I recognized a few vegetables and something like meat here and there. I smiled. "It looks lovely, Christine." We sat and I gallantly braved the concoction. It didn't matter anyway, did it, since I could barely taste anything. But nothing had been cooked the proper length of time.

Christine's face fell as she took her first bite. "It's awful," she said sadly.

"No it isn't." Surely not even the most virtuous could fault me for such a lie.

"You're only trying to make me feel better, but you can't. I can't do this."

"Christine. Could you sing _The Magic Flute_ the first time you tried?" She shook her head mutely. "Well then, there's no reason to think this is going to be perfect the first time either. There's a shelf full of books in the kitchen. You may use any of them that you wish." It would give her something to do, and I certainly couldn't have her messing about with things in my house when she was bored. She really ought to have learned how to cook _something_ by this time in her life. I recalled my frustration with her interruptions earlier. I certainly hoped she wouldn't expect me to cook every time she got hungry.

"I'm sorry, Erik. I wanted it to be perfect. Like… like a wife would make." Her apology seemed out of place, considering that she'd left behind the opportunity to never have to cook or clean or do anything she did not wish to again.

"I shouldn't worry, my dear. There are many ways to be a wife." She blushed and looked down, moving the food around on her plate.

"Can we sing after lunch?" she asked.

"Certainly. Would you like to work on _Aida_ again?"

"No." Her tone was unusually decisive and I blinked at her for a moment. "That is, I'd rather sing Marguerite."

"But we know you can sing that."

"I'd like to work on it, though. Just to be sure."

I was not about to curb her enthusiasm, but her strange firmness was slightly confusing. Not that I wasn't aware she had reserves within her—she'd told the boy off, hadn't she?—but I wasn't used to her being so decided in her choices. It didn't matter; it didn't make much of a difference whether we sang _Faust_ or _Aida_, really, and I was happy to comply. After we'd rehearsed and I'd critiqued and praised her I allowed my desire free reign again and in her turn she complied without a murmur. Well, almost, but I somehow thought that certain noises were not incompatible with compliance.


	6. Chapter 6

**Warnings**: The sex in this chapter contains elements of force and dubious/non-consent.

* * *

Where that day ended and the next began and ended again, I could not precisely say. I lived in a sort of spell cast by her body and her voice and every once in awhile I ate or told her stories or watched her sleep. I felt as if Christine was seeping through osmosis into my very being, her compliant presence filling me with something I had never had before. Was it contentment? Was it that simple? Or was it that physical acceptance I had craved for so long and craved even now unless my skin touched hers? Christine floated through it all, serene and angelic and warm and alive, like a dream I still could not admit was real, despite the ample evidence of my senses. It was everything I had wanted. Everything…

"Where are my papers?" I asked Christine. She was looking over yet another score.

"Papers?"

"Yes. They were in my study. Have you been in my study?"

She hesitated a moment, as if I was likely to hurt her if she said the wrong thing. Which, I supposed, the man I had been might have given her reason to think. "I cleaned up," she said defensively.

"By 'cleaned up' do you actually mean 'threw away your papers'?"

"I don't know," she said helplessly. "Perhaps. I… they made no sense, there was nothing on them. Just scribbles. I thought they were trash." There was suddenly a sort of pain in my head, behind my left eye. My "scribbles" were actually plans and ideas and things I was working on, like a stove that used electricity instead of gas and new lights and extra rooms, not to mention abandoned, currently unnecessary plans for a lifelike automaton. "I'm sorry, Erik. I thought I was helping. I can go find them."

"Do not go through my things, Christine. Haven't you learned that much yet? Don't mess with things you don't understand. It probably means they're important."

"Erik!" She looked on the verge of tears, and I knew because I was standing over her, hovering like a hunting falcon. Or perhaps a circling vulture was more apt. "I'll go get them—"

As suddenly as it had arrived, my anger dispersed, flowing backwards into whatever place I kept it and I fell to my knees in front of her, grasping her hand. "Christine, please forgive me. I had no right to say such things to you. They're nothing, really. I can get them; I won't have you going through the garbage. Can't allow that. My temper… I let it get away from me at times."

She nodded, still tearful but not in immediate danger of overflow. "I… I understand, Erik. I shouldn't have done it. I thought I could help."

"You do help, my love. Every day. I would have died without you, Christine." Suddenly I wasn't certain we were still talking about the papers. Was it supposed to be a work in progress, this business of redemption? Beauty had saved the beast with a kiss. No one ever talked about what happened after the two were married. Did she have to train him to use his silver again instead of wolfing down chunks of raw meat from a plate on the floor? His grooming habits must have been appalling, but at least he'd been given a form worth taking care of.

Well, the Opera had not been built in a day, or even a year. I had changed, I knew that much. I could feel it in the pressure of her fingers as they rested on my shoulder, the electric charge of her touch that had nothing to do with pain or humiliation or death. Not the permanent kind, anyway. "I'm not going to hurt you," I promised her. "I'm not like that anymore."

She smiled finally. "I know," she said, and I thought I detected a hint of pride in her voice. In the end, I dug through the garbage myself and managed to find most of what she'd put there.

That was an isolated interlude in an otherwise idyllic honeymoon. I had never—never!—been cared for, and I basked in her regard like a homeless dog by a fire. All I had needed, I said to myself, was someone who thought of me as a man. I devoted myself to her. I wanted to know her inside and outside, though I knew the former was less practical, since I found I liked her alive. Most of our time was spent in music, recalling her first days with me. Except that then I'd been so confused, so at a loss as to how to deal with her presence or what she would want or need. Now I could spend companionable evenings at her side, reading to her from books I thought she might like. I started with Poe, hoping the short, atmospheric poetry and stories would engage her. And every so often I left her alone for a few hours at a time to attend to my own work.

"Erik?"

I barely glanced up from my desk where I was scratching furiously away at some new design. "Christine, can't you see I'm busy? Please, leave me be until I'm finished, won't you?" Some things did not change, I mused. I could not concentrate with her around.

"I have to tell you—"

"Can't it wait? Go on, will you?" I had to get these thoughts down; experience told me that my mind turned rapidly and did not always accurately save what it created. It had to be recorded before I went on to some new idea, or I'd lament the first one's loss, however trivial it may end up being. I eventually registered her absence, and went on working. I'd noticed a hum in certain electric devices, like arc lights, and I was trying to work out if one could alter the pitch of the hum by using different materials. Or was it the amount of current? I had heard of recent developments which made possible the faithful reproduction of sound by means marking down on foil or wax the vibrations made while speaking which was then able to infinitely replicate the original event. And the telephone, as it was called, which could transmit the voice through wires the way electricity was carried. My head was full of things like this, all vying for attention, all claiming some connection to one another. If I attempted to shut them off, I might be able to ignore them but then I would miss something, something important. I had to at least set down these germs of ideas so that I could better organize them later and better know how to implement them. As it was, my brain was flying from one improbable fantasy to the next, from amplification of one's voice to simultaneous transmission of a live event, such as opera, to a remote location to instruments that worked not on the principle of vibrations in the air but vibrations in current that one could control entirely by means of switches.

It must have been some time later that I roused myself from my work-induced trance. Christine must be lonely. She'd said something, I really didn't remember what about, but it behooved me to find out, I decided. The house was strangely quiet as I moved from the study into the parlor. I wondered if she'd fallen asleep. I never really knew what time it was, anymore. I ate when she grew hungry, although not as often; I slept when she grew tired, though not as long. I was about to move into the bedroom when a knock came, startling me. Damn him if he woke her up, I thought furiously as I looked through the door to see the little busybody standing there as if he had every right to come calling like a favored suitor.

"I hope this isn't becoming a pattern with you," I growled, wrenching open the door and shutting it behind me.

"Is this a bad time?" the ex-policeman asked mildly.

"Yes. If I'd known you were coming, I'd have tidied the place up a bit. Reset the traps, perhaps." That earned me a half smile, though I couldn't fathom when my efforts to intimidate had become so comical. I supposed I was losing my touch. Marriage had made me soft, and the thought gave me a mingled satisfaction and panic. Not a combination which made for easy digestion. "Did you risk your fragile health for a reason, or is my ability to amuse you sufficient?"

"I came to apologize, in fact," he said.

"For what?"

"For my lack of faith. Of course I had no reason to trust you, but I ought to have given you the benefit of the doubt. For that, I am sorry."

"What are you talking about?" I wondered where my impatience came from. Perhaps to counteract the treacherous glimmer of pleasure I felt at seeing the nosy little man again.

"When I accused you of spiriting Mademoiselle Daae away again. You denied it and I have come to learn that you were telling the truth."

That only made me suspicious. What could he have learned to contradict the truth? From whom? "What?" I wasn't even sure what I was asking, but it was all that came out.

"She seems to be in excellent health and spirits; or so she was four days ago, when I saw her conferring with the managers." He eyed me suddenly. "It is extremely unwise for her to come back, after all you've done to her. All you've done to each other, rather. You did know she was back, didn't you? You aren't thinking of trying anything again? I intend to warn her against arousing your ire, but I felt I owed you the apology nevertheless."

"Tell me what she said," I demanded in a tone that usually brooked no opposition and substantially weakened one's desire to oppose.

He still had the gall to look incredulous. I wondered if my voice was broken. "Erik, surely you know she's been signed on by the managers. Her disappearance caused quite a stir in the papers; they think they can profit from her notoriety. Apparently so can she. Especially now that she's broken off with her fiancé: 'to devote herself to her career,' she said. She's asked for her old dressing room back as well." He paused while I seethed in silent, volcanic fury. "Erik… do you have any part in this? You haven't seen the girl, have you?"

"Excuse me. I have urgent business to attend to," I said coldly. Which involved seeing the girl, most definitely. Beyond that, I would not think.

"Erik, let me in. Let me speak with you."

"What makes you think I would do any such thing?"

"For old time's sake. Don't do anything rash; I should not have said anything. Let me come with you."

"What part of 'no' are you incapable of translating, old man? Now. Go. Away. By God, I really will kill you this time!" I would kill someone, of that I felt certain. The palms of my hands itched with it. But he probably didn't deserve it. Not for this, anyway. I slammed back into the house. "Christine!" I didn't care if he heard me; he could do nothing anyway. I tore the bedroom door nearly from its frame and stepped inside, a tower of black rage, only to find the bed and the room empty. I blew through the room into the bathroom, then out again and through the rest of the house in a maelstrom of righteous wrath. "Dammit, woman, where are you?" There was only one thing for it. She'd gone above. The daroga had been speaking the truth, as ill-advised as such practices usually were. He held onto his honesty like a drowning man did a sinking ship.

By the time I made it to the second cellar, making my way hastily and without much care although managing to avoid my Persian nemesis, I could hear her. She was trilling away at the Jewel Song, sounding for all the world like a greedy little hussy without a care in the world. I didn't know whether it was worse for it to be all acting or not. Although I had to admit; she sounded exquisite. That permeated even through my thoughts of violence.

Oh, I did feel the violence, felt it rising within me like the tide. She had deceived me, betrayed me, cuckolded me again. Used my good faith against me. She had all of me, every bit of blood and bone and sinew. Why was it not enough? My soul, even, such as it was, was at her disposal, not to mention my heart, which was full to bursting now that I had added betrayal and rage to the love which had sat there before, still sat there now. I was in my box now and the auditorium was dark. It was not a full rehearsal, but the rest of the principals milled about while she sang, some of them watching her, and I wanted to kill them for laying eyes on her, my own, my love, lover, beloved. How dare they? How dare she, when I had claimed her, when she knew she belonged to me and me alone?

I did not wait for the rest of the rehearsal. Nothing could be done now, not without drawing undue attention to myself, of which I'd had more than enough to last me some time. I would wait, and she'd told me exactly where I would find her. I had no illusions that her request for the old dressing room had any basis in sentiment. No, she'd planned this. Thought she could flit between two worlds like some kind of amphibious diva of the underworld, like Persephone in spring, like I was some hell-god who had entrapped her. Entrapped her! She had ensnared me from the beginning, and I was still caught in her spell. Even now I didn't really believe any of the things I was thinking. Or rather, the thoughts existed alongside the certainty of her complete and utter innocence. Is it possible to describe how the two contradictory concepts existed within me? How at the sight of her entering her dressing room, the blood showing pinkish through her skin from her exertion, made me want to kill her and simply want her at the same time?

I laughed softly, and the peculiar acoustics of the bricks on either side of the mirror amplified my voice so that it took on a god-like resonance. Her head whipped around, only to meet her own reflection, but she knew it was me, of course.

"Erik, I tried to tell you. You wouldn't listen."

"It is your turn to listen, my dove." My voice was vicious, a wounded tiger of a voice, but I had lost all finesse. I sprung the mechanism of the mirror and pulled her through bodily. Before, I would have needed only sound. She protested on the way down, her voice becoming more supplicating and timid the longer I met her with silence. I didn't know what to say to her, what to do with her, but I could not do it here. It had to be home.

The bedroom. I threw her down on the bed, where she rubbed one wrist with her other hand. Her face was white as death, though two little spots of color hovered on her cheeks. Anger, was it? Like wearing red in a bull ring. And her picadors had been at me already.

"Erik, why are you doing this?" She made an effort to keep her voice firm, but it was falling around the edges.

"Shut up. You had your chance up there, on stage. Did you enjoy it? Showing off in front of all of them. Oh I've heard all about it, lover. Think you can cash in on your borrowed fame without paying for it? Fame, I needn't add, you borrowed from me."

She shook her head and opened her mouth. "I'm yours, Erik, I only—" I shut it with my own, kissing her roughly. I didn't want her excuses and I didn't want my own inadequate verbal artillery. I only wanted her. Seeing her on stage, hearing her sing to all those people had made me desire her more than ever but I didn't want the tender worshiping of the past week. It wasn't enough, it simply wasn't, I couldn't keep her here with tenderness alone though I'd tried so hard. I put my hand to her throat and she gasped but I only pulled downwards on her dress, ripping the thing to shreds before I could remove it fully. My hands were everywhere, kneading, pulling, claiming, my mouth tasting and testing and devouring. She squirmed against me in protest, her eyes pleading though she was wisely silent. Her eyes… they matched the sky of the painting behind her, the only sky I would ever walk under without fear, and I didn't want to see them now.

"Turn over," I ordered, my voice reduced to an ugly, lust-filled growl. In her confusion she hesitated so I did it for her and she stifled a groan as she landed on her arm. She lay spread before me, an entire unexplored continent I had only begun to map. Not enough, it hadn't been enough, but when I drove forward in my role as intrepid explorer I realized that it hadn't been enough for me either only I hadn't known it, that this was like nothing I'd ever felt and I pulled her up against me, possessing her entirely.

The guilt descended almost immediately afterwards. I lay beside her, catching my breath, my body still caught in the afterthoughts of passion, and I noticed the red mark on her wrist, the tangle of former garments clinging to her legs. I remembered as if in one of my horrible dreams of deeds long gone that I had lost control with her, that I had done something I'd never before allowed myself, even in my most violent, lustful rages. I'd subjected her to the monster within me.

The monster I thought she had vanquished. That was the true horror for me: had it all been a lie? I had to make it better. I had to or she would leave me, as she already had. But how? Sorry did not begin to address it. It was an empty word, devoid of future. It could only touch things past.

I hazarded a look to my right, expecting her to be gone or at the least crying and attempting to cover herself. She was only watching me with a strange, glassy intensity, tears of pain in the corners of her eyes but none falling. "I'm sorry," she said after a moment.

I almost choked on my response. "Sorry? Christine, my darling, my love… you've nothing to be sorry for, it's me—"

"I should not have gone above without your permission," she said slowly, almost deliberately.

"Oh Christine…" I moaned, hardly listening. "Christine, please forgive me. I know I don't deserve it, I know that, but I'm trying, please believe me. I'll make it up to you, just say it and it's yours. I'm your slave, you know that… your dog… do what you like with me." Nothing, nothing could make me clean again, not even her, because I did not deserve forgiveness. She'd leave me and I would surely die again and I didn't want that, not when I'd learned so recently what I'd been missing from life.

She sat up then and turned to me, her disarranged hair spilling over bare skin like a shower of sunlight on marble. "I want to sing, Erik," she said quietly, her eyes fixing me with their intensity even as the threatened tears began to leak from them.

"Sing? Now? Christine, we need to talk about this." I didn't want to talk, I wanted to die, to dissolve, to evaporate into the air so I would never have to face this.

"I am. I mean… I want my job back. At the Opera. I can't live without that."

Something began to permeate the guilt-ridden fog obscuring my brain from view. "Is that what your dearly-rejected fiancé demanded? Is that why you left him?"

"This has nothing to do with him," she said angrily, but she took a breath and continued calmly, evenly. "I did it for you. For us. I want to sing. You always said you wanted the world to hear my voice. You can have that, and me too. Isn't that what you wanted?" She'd wiped the tears from her face and looked earnest and confused. She really had thought this was what I wanted.

I nodded miserably. I had said that. But I had lost track of what was going on. Her hand was cautiously, inexorably snaking its way up my leg. Her first self-initiated touch. I didn't know whether she intended it to remind me of my grievous sin and my duty to make it up to her or if she was trying to influence me by means of physical rather than emotional persuasion, but it didn't really matter did it? She was touching me of her own accord and that superseded reason. "I can't lose you, Christine. I can't let you go." It was all I could think, the only excuse I could make even if it was woefully inadequate.

"I'm here, Erik. I told you what I'd decided. Up there," she waved her free hand, "is just the audience. You understand what music means to me."

"I hurt you."

"You were upset, Erik," she said, looking down. "You didn't mean it."

I buried my face in my hands. I didn't know what to make of this, how she could know what I meant. "I can never be forgiven, Christine. I can never be good enough for you."

She pulled my hands away and held them in her own. "That's not true," she said fiercely, or as close as I'd ever heard her come to it. "You let me go when you thought that was what I wanted. When you knew it would kill you. A monster would not have done so. We both just have to try harder, that's all." She gazed at me, really looking at me, and I knew I had lost.

"You'll be wonderful," I said, and she offered me a smile, her simple, country, shy smile, and I was swept up again in her. Did she know I'd give her anything she asked for just to see that smile leveled at me? At the same time, however, I felt anxiety tighten its grip on me and I knew this would kill me, because she was leaving me again little by little, even if she came back every day. I should have killed her, I thought wildly. I could have killed her when she was still mine, and mine forever. I should have prevented this from happening. I imagined the blood that had so frightened me that first time as her life blood, myself as the last thing she saw, the last touch she felt, imprinted wholly upon her as she would always be upon me. It would only have been fair. Now it was too late.

I sensed movement and focused on her again as she took my face between her hands. "You'll be so proud of me, Erik. They'll all know what I can do; what you taught me. And I'll be singing for you. Only you. You have to trust me."

I shook my head. I didn't trust anyone, I didn't trust myself, I couldn't. But it was a lie too, because some part of me had trusted her from the beginning against every bit of better judgment I could muster. Or if trust wasn't the word, it didn't matter, because my brain no longer had control over my emotions. They were wholly hers. No amount of suspicion would allow me to alter that.


	7. Chapter 7

I made her write out a schedule of when she had rehearsal. She tried to soothe me with protestations of her trustworthiness but it didn't matter what I believed or what she promised; I was incapable of letting her out of my sight. There was one scheduled for the next day and I let her go, although not without following behind and watching from the box as she breezed her way through Marguerite again. She was so beautiful it hurt to think about the hundreds of people who would see her shining up there like their own personal salvation—hundreds, thousands!—of potential temptations for her, night after night, of which I was but one. Flowers in her dressing room, boys with scarves: it would all begin again, wouldn't it, my idyll broken for a second time. I had not come so far only to be thwarted by another young pup.

As before, I awaited her in her dressing room. This time, however, I lingered in the room itself rather than behind the mirror. Perhaps I could surprise her. Perhaps, as my eyes took in the divan, the room held other possibilities. The thought excited me, although I needed no further excitement. Apprehension and desire twisted within me frantically every time I thought of her on that stage. Possibilities flew through my mind with the speed and erratic flight of bats catching their supper, until at last I heard feet on the passageway outside, only the footfalls were too heavy, and—

"They're coming," he said. I stared in surprise at the daroga, who had appeared like magic though I knew it was my own mental disarray rather than his prowess which had caused the breach in security. I noticed that he did not look terribly old in the light, not as old as on that night I pulled him from the torture chamber and sent him home. His incongruous green eyes were as keen as ever and his black hair was only just starting to streak with silver. Like mine. "She's not alone. There are some girls with her. She won't shake them off before she gets here and you ought to be out of the way."

I nodded, hearing the truth of his words coming down the corridor, and I touched the hidden switch which slid the mirror into the pocket inside the wall. He stared at me and I realized that I'd given myself away, but it didn't really matter. We were both well aware that he'd already found and used it. "Are you coming?" I asked tersely, and he followed, both of us turning to watch as Christine entered the room, surrounded by a flesh-and-tulle concoction of uncertain proportions.

"No really, Christine," one of them continued. "You left him? Just like that? Are you mad?"

She smiled. "No, Meg. I just thought about what was important to me and realized it was all here." She glanced surreptitiously at the mirror but it wasn't a look of apprehension or dread and I sensed the man next to me turn his head in my direction.

"You're not going to turn me in, are you?" I asked dryly, knowing how softly I had to speak to be unheard on the other side of the wall.

"Turn you in? Why would I risk my life saving you in Persia only to hand you over to the Suerté? For that I could be warm and comfortable and surrounded by four wives and innumerable children." He sounded genuinely perplexed by this, and it surprised me because I thought he had been threatening such all along.

"But Christine! He was so rich! I would die to have a man like that wish to marry me! Who cares about the blasted ballet? I want servants and children and carriages." The girl paused, tilted her head. "Would you mind if I attempted to comfort him in his time of need? Or maybe he wasn't so good in bed. Never thought you'd sample the wares before buying, Mademoiselle Prude."

Christine blushed furiously but ignored the last comment as the giggles rose around her, while the blood rising in my face seemed to be all before my eyes. I had to restrain myself from wringing that stupid scrawny slut's neck. "There are more important things than marriage, Cécile. Music. Love. And I want them to go together." She smiled again secretively, and I wondered if it was meant for me, if she was even conscious of it. "In the meantime, I'm going to be a great singer."

"I thought you loved him," the little Giry girl said. I wished they'd all go away. Why did they have to talk to her? Why did she have to talk back? Rehearsal was over and the conversation was making me nervous.

"I did too, Meg. But…" and she frowned slightly "…I'm not sure it was enough. Not when there are things I want to do. He loved me for what I was ten years ago. I want someone who loves me for what I am. What I could be."

My companion looked my direction again, though light was limited. "Besides, Erik, I'm not sure what I could charge you with. Are you sure you know what you're doing?"

"I don't believe that's your business."

"Perhaps not." He looked back at the group of girls, resolving finally into four separate bodies. "I wish you luck, my friend. Perhaps one day you will tell me how it all happened."

"I can't imagine why you think I should have to, with you snooping around all the time."

"I can't believe you came back," Cécile was saying. "After everything… Aren't you frightened?"

"Of course not," Christine said breezily, and I wondered at the change in her from when I had first laid eyes on her. Shrinking away from the inane chatter of the chorus girls, afraid of everything, in constant need of guidance. Now she held court, evading their inquiries easily. She was confident.

"What if he comes back?" Meg eyed the corners of the room warily, as if expecting me to leap out from behind a hat rack.

"That's over," she said. "He won't trouble you any more."

"Aren't you going to accuse me of hypnotizing her? Of holding her captive with my mysterious powers of persuasion?" I whispered.

The daroga snorted lightly. "Please, Erik. I don't think even you are that good. I told you before I wanted only to be sure she was not a hostage. If she's come back of her own free will, I am pleased for you. I'm not sure if spying on the girl is the proper way to ensure her continued attentions, but that's between the two of you. But when I spoke to her—"

"You what?" He might as well have replaced my blood with ice water.

"She stopped me in the hallway yesterday, after rehearsal. She thanked me for saving the young man's life. When I asked her why she thought I was responsible, she hesitated and told me a friend had told her." I knew him well enough to sense the raised eyebrow even in the near-dark. "I know quite well that she has not spoken to Chagny in weeks. Neither has she been home. In fact, the place is let to someone else. The girl is quite talented and could have a career anywhere. So I told her I understood that congratulations were in order. She said 'he told you then' and then said that she supposed he would tell his friends. I am honored to be so counted, Erik. Although she doesn't like me very much, does she?"

"I don't like you very much either, but that doesn't seem to stand in your way when you wish to annoy me. Now that you know, you can stop poking your nose into my business." Christine had started herding the girls out, and I was getting anxious for him to be gone.

"It's not likely to be any fun anymore, since you've renounced your life of crime. You clearly wish me absent, so I will take my leave. Be careful, old man. I hope you know what you're doing."

"And I hope you know what's best for you," I growled. He was mocking me, I could sense it, but I wasn't sure how and it disturbed me. I grabbed his arm as he turned to go. "I will not have you saying anything against her, do you hear me? She gave everything up for me, to be my wife. She rescued me."

He held up his hands. "I can say nothing against her character, Erik. She is obviously a fine and worthy young lady; but she did not give everything up." I followed his gaze to where she sat before the mirror, brushing her hair and humming an aria from _Faust_. "Women are complicated. I wished to warn you."

"_I'm _complicated." Purity was the absence of complication, and Christine was an angel. "She's everything I need, now. And I don't need you to tell me what to do. Have you given up detecting to become my mother?" Her movements distracted me, desire rising past the pre-established high-tide lines. Her face in the mirror at her table, reflected into infinity by the one behind which I crouched night after night, an endless loop that touched off something in me that I couldn't turn off.

The Persian shrugged. "I didn't think you had one. But you are complicated, I will grant

you that." How different things were now. Now, instead of sitting back here like a lecherous spider I had only to touch a spring and I could go to her as myself, as a man, and be received by a living, breathing woman, not that dead fantasy of my torturous dreams. All those nights watching her unknown, unseen, unfulfilled, were over.

And now the unsavory little foreigner knew where to look, too. "If I ever catch you here, daroga, if I catch you near her, so help me—"

"Erik. I will not ask you to trust me, since that is asking too much, but in this matter I can safely say that I have no discourteous intentions towards your… towards the young lady. I could go to Cécile Jammes for that. I only wish your continued happiness. You make things so difficult when you aren't." He looked down at where my long, pale fingers gripped his forearm, practically the only things visible in that light, and I let go. With a last look at the girl behind the mirror, he slid into the shadows, but I could hear him for quite some distance.

I tried to shake off the uneasiness I always felt after our little conversations. I didn't know what he wanted anymore. Things used to be so simple; we were on opposing sides, hunter and hunted but now I couldn't remember which was which and the lines had gotten tangled somewhere. Now I didn't know where he stood, or why he kept showing up, or why I could not pinpoint the purpose of his interest. It made me nervous, not the least because I felt I had to keep myself from spilling out my secrets to him in a way I never had to worry about otherwise. Or perhaps the feeling was due to the woman I saw behind the glass now. Certainly my insides seemed to form themselves into unnatural shapes when I looked at her. A mingled pleasure and pain, anxiety and lust, I wanted her all to myself and wanted her even more when she gave herself to others. Wanted to mark her once and for all as mine and mine alone, so that she could never forget it.

This time when I opened the mirror she seemed to be waiting, and her resistance to the pressure I exerted on her hand was minimal. The anger from the day before had dissipated, but the violence of my feelings had not. I could not read her face during the journey down but we said nothing to each other and when we reached her bedroom she wordlessly began unbuttoning her dress.

"Not fast enough," I said softly, low in my throat. "You are not anxious to meet me after your rehearsals, I see. Not at all anxious to come back to me." She shook her head, about to protest. "I was watching, Christine. I heard you speaking to those shameless little ballet strumpets. Telling them about me, were you?" She shook her head again as her fingers moved more quickly and I knew it was the truth, that she had very wisely kept her whereabouts a secret, but it didn't matter. I couldn't help it. The fear inside me was like another voice, another mind. "They're not good enough for you. They're common little deviants and I will not have you listening to their stupid perverted gossip." I walked towards her. Her chest was laid bare to me now. "You're so beautiful, Christine. So perfect. You can't let anyone mar that." She gasped as I laid a hand on her breast and her response, whether from fear or the cold of my flesh or, God help me, desire, goaded me further. "You left me waiting," I said, and I knew it was pathetic, that I was pleading now. I was losing control again and I didn't care. She was responsible for it. I was nothing next to her, powerless. Anything I did now, she had made me do.

"What…" She swallowed. "What do you want, Erik?" Was it fear? Was that what I saw in her eyes? Or did she really want to know? Impossible—the images in my head would drive her away, if not into madness.

"Touch me, Christine. Now." I needed her, needed to feel her against me again, to prove to myself she was here still, that she hadn't left. She slowly drew off my shirt, not looking at my face even as she untied the mask and let it fall. Her hands hesitated and my own fingers tore like talons at the buttons of my trousers. When I was unclothed I began to direct her hands to my skin, conducting her like a concerto for two hands but something was missing, she still wasn't looking at me and by God I would not have her imagining that perfect modern Adonis she'd given up. She had made her choice and I would make her face every last consequence.

I moved her with me until the edge of the bed met her legs and she stumbled back upon it. I pulled her dress down the rest of the way and it lay on the floor like a snake's discarded skin. "Look at me," I ordered. "Look at me, all of me. It's what you wanted, isn't it? It's what you've taken and now you have to keep it." I held my body over hers, not touching but for the hand that held her wrists above her head. "I am not your perfect vicomte. I am not young and beautiful and carved from marble but flesh and blood and I'm yours. Just as you are mine. All of you, forever. Don't ever imagine otherwise. And look at me when I'm talking to you." My hand snaked down her body, as velvety smooth as my voice, and her eyes flew open when I reached the place her legs joined. My mouth followed to where other parts of me wanted so desperately to be, but then mother had always said I had clever fingers and the devil's own tongue and no one could say that of that boy, no. She could not escape me this way. The bed began to tremble with her and I briefly wondered if I was hurting her but she had hurt me so many times and now I hurt but she was the only way to make it stop and as I came to rest in her she stiffened and then went silent, staring at me with a doll's reflective gaze until it was over and I rolled to the side.

As the languor took hold of me so did the guilt, and once again I took her in my arms and held her, but she wasn't crying. She just looked at me, puzzled. "I can be whatever you want," I promised. "Just give me time. I'm no good at this. I just need the chance."

"I understand, Erik," she said, but she couldn't, really. She couldn't know what it felt like, to be with her. To be threatened with losing her. To want her so badly that I wanted to cut her open so I could climb inside and stay forever. "Can we sing?"

I hesitated, bending to retrieve the mask before I spoke. "Of course, my darling, if that is what you want. I'll be in the other room. Take your time."

She sang, and I corrected her like I was the pupil, a trained monkey convinced his dancing, and not the organ grinder, is responsible for the music. When the lesson ground futilely to a halt she bent and kissed my forehead.

"I'm going to make us some supper. I know how much you like to work on your machines and things. I've been using the books you showed me. Did you know?"

"You're doing very well, my dear." In truth I had no idea what she'd been cooking because I barely tasted it. Between my distraction thinking about her and the fear churning in my stomach food had become even less of a priority, though I dutifully tried everything she put before me.

I walked into my workroom and looked around at the shelves and tables full of complicated little nothings. It was all just another way to waste time, to fill the hours and days before she arrived to fill me. I remembered the plans and visions I'd had, the intense desire for creation, as if they belonged to someone else. The blueprints and notes I pawed through might have been written in a foreign language, and when I took up a pencil to make an attempt I found myself sketching her again and again in the margins of some plan for a system to keep rooms cool in summer. When would I ever need that? I lived underground. Much more useful to try to catch in these thin lines the curve of her body. But that was futile as well. I might as well attempt to imitate her voice, a project as inadequate as it was impossible.

My thoughts drifted as I waited for her to deliver me from the purposelessness of time spent away from her. I wondered what the daroga had meant by wishing me luck and asking if I knew what I was doing. Christine wasn't complicated. Her simplicity had drawn me to her. That, and her innocence. Even her body was innocent, slender and forever trapped in that stage before true womanhood. She'd never be a matronly figure. She would never grow up. She would never cease to be exactly what she was now.

But then I remembered the blood. The blood which had first made her real to me, a woman. She was a woman, which meant she was mortal. It seemed impossible that I had not thought of it before, but with that realization the full weight of her eventual death descended upon me. She was already leaving me piece by piece and all too soon she'd leave me forever. Nothing would remain of her in this world. A few moldering newspaper clippings, perhaps, in her ex-fiancés bottom drawer. I had somehow assumed that my victory, once granted, was irrevocable, but it seemed I had lost anyway. I tried to push the thoughts, the fear, away. Perhaps that was what the daroga meant, I thought. It had to be, because if he'd ever showed any amount of interest in the girl he'd be dead already.

I say that, but I knew I wasn't going to kill him. Perhaps I had lost my taste for death. Or perhaps I had never really wanted to kill him. He seemed to belong where he was. Two days later, when I crept into Box 5, it seemed almost inevitable that he be waiting for me there, in my favorite chair, book in hand. Not welcome; inevitable. Thought I had a nagging thought that if I wasn't careful, I'd come to expect him everywhere and be disappointed when he didn't show up.

"Taking over my old job? Or are you more of a personal ghost?" I asked to mitigate the treachery of my silent conclusions.

He looked up. "I presume the position is open since your reformation. I thought it might be a good career change for me. Who better to turn to crime than a policeman?"

I walked over and pulled the book from his hand. _Notre Dame de Paris_. "I suppose you find yourself very funny," I said darkly.

"What?" he asked, all feigned innocence. Or stupidity, it was hard to tell which. "I thought I required some assistance with my French. And I don't see what you have to be sensitive about. You resemble Claude Frollo only superficially." I'd read it; there was precious little else to do some years, and at the time I had merely pitied the poor stupid fools for falling in love in the first place when it was patently obvious that they'd all come to a bad end. Now, his evocation of Quasimodo's doomed love seemed obvious and underhanded.

"Your French is as good as mine, as you well know."

"Thanks to you. A strange coincidence, isn't it, that I should have taken the trouble to learn any when, at the time, I had every intention of remaining in Persia the rest of my life. It certainly came in handy later."

"It's not a coincidence at all. You only came here because you knew the language. Cause and effect are not coincidence. Both of us ending up here, today, perhaps."

He looked at me for a moment before speaking. "You're right, of course." I thought he was going to say more, but the silence lengthened and we both turned to watch the stage. Mephistopheles was warming up.

"Why are you here?" I asked suddenly.

"My continued survival depends on my never returning to Persia, or had you forgotten?" he replied blandly.

"Don't be a fool. Why are you here, in my box, in her dressing room, at my door… everywhere? Are you waiting for me to stray from the path again? I tell you I'm not going to. I'm finished with that. You had plenty of evidence against me, plenty of chances to try to kill me if you wanted to risk your own life. Why play the spy? I've been saved, damn it, I told you!"

"I'm not spying on you, Erik. For one thing, I haven't made any effort to conceal my presence."

"You could be a very bad spy."

"And another thing: if you've been saved, why do you still want to kill everyone?"

I opened my mouth, then shut it. Opened again. "I—"

"It doesn't matter. That's not the point."

"Do tell me you have one."

He paused, shifting in his chair to face me, his gaze taking on a glittering, green-eyed intensity. "I'm not young anymore, Erik. I'm getting old, and far from home and family and everything I knew. It doesn't matter that that's been true for fifteen years; there comes a time when you look back and wonder what you're doing, what you've got to show for it. I have nothing. And these past months I'd felt I found a purpose—"

"In bringing me down."

He shook his head. "That was never the point. Erik, we used to be friends. Well, as much as the Shah's wife would allow you to be friends with anyone. Don't you remember? Remember when we made up our own rules for chess? When we'd trade stories in the evenings when it was cool enough to sit outside? We weren't enemies." I did remember; the warm air coming in off the hot sand as the sun went down, the evenings of lemonade and talk, devising ever-more-complicated varieties of games, trading bilingual witticisms. Companionship of a tenuous kind, so unfamiliar I hadn't ever thought to name it. Was it enough? Were sugar-water and checkmates reason not to have killed him on sight?

"I'm afraid I'm still missing the point of this enlightening little litany of meaningless reminiscence. If we weren't enemies, why did you give that pretty imbecile the grand tour? What do you want?"

"A truce."

I laughed. "A truce? Are we at war then after all? I fear I must I remind you, daroga, that I'm hardly the exemplar of chivalry."

He smiled, a strange, secret smile that I could very well imagine had led Christine to her "odd" and "mad" conclusions about him. "I know better than to believe that, Erik, no matter how amoral you make yourself out to be. You're an honest villain. And you have ample evidence that I keep my word, whatever you think of the word itself."

I nodded, after a moment. The bastard saw through me, and always had. I hated him for it, even as it tickled my vanity to be so scrutinized, so regarded. But in the spirit of honesty, I had to recall my defense of him to Christine. An old friend. Not that I had expected him to hear about that. "And what would our truce consist of? What makes you think I care one way or the other? I have things to do. I have Christine. I have a home and a wife and I don't need you anymore."

He smiled sadly and produced a little box from his pocket. "Chess?"

I sighed and dropped into the seat next to him. "Only until she comes on." I beat him three games in a row.


	8. Chapter 8

We did not speak about what had brought us to this pass, the daroga and I. When it came time for me to meet Christine I took my leave and realized on the way to her dressing room that I was calmer than I had been in some time. At least, aside from those few precious moments of lying next to her. I had never been one for nostalgia. Memories I wanted to dwell on were few and far between. But I found myself remembering that indeed, the only times I'd been able to relax at all in Mazenderan were in his presence. He'd been able to make me leave, for a moment or two at a time, the horrors I'd been goaded into perpetrating. He'd never judged me, I realized, even as he made his own moral code blatantly obvious. Could I say the same of anyone else? Even so, I could not think what he'd ever gotten out of it. He had to loathe me and what I was with every fiber of his upstanding, orthodox soul. Naturally, I could not trust a man with no visible motivation. I would remain on my guard. But surely some conversation and games of chess could do no harm. I didn't see any reason to abandon the relationship completely.

Relationshipi_s/i_. From the penal solitude of none to two in such short succession. It made one wonder, really, what I'd done to suddenly deserve membership in humanity. Perhaps it wasn't a matter of deserving, but just allowing Christine's goodness to absolve me. Accepting her as my mistress and savior and letting faith do the rest. Baptism in her heavenly body, a body which was now entering her dressing room in all its incarnate glory. Communion at the table of her bedchamber where I feasted upon her flesh until she shuddered with it. Pouring my own confession, a confession no longer of blood and death but only of love, into the air as I pushed her head down between my own legs.

"Such a good student, my love, so good, Christine, my angel, my angel… Oh God…" It was the only prayer I knew but later when her face swam back into view I wondered if I could look at her mouth the same way again or if by pressing it to my flesh I had twisted it out of all recognition and made it unfit to repeat the catechism of my innocent lover. No, she was still the same. She looked the same, blushed the same, forgave my transgressions, and they were many, with the same shy grace as always. As she would the next day too, after nothing would satisfy me but for her to kneel with her back to me so that I could take her like an animal in the field that filled the wall of her bedroom, like the depraved beast I really was. Had been, rather.

Choices are made by weighing rewards against consequences. And the shame never seemed to be as substantial as the pleasure, even if it lasted longer. Most of the time, it didn't. Lust held sway. My desire for her would last as long, longer, than she would. And there was so little time in which to have her that I felt it my duty to the world to preserve the impression of her perfect flesh on mine as long and as deeply as possible. That twinge of guilt would evaporate like a summer shower which in any event only served to intensify the humidity rather than assuage it.

Christine and I never spoke of it. I wouldn't have known what to say and she was far too timid (she might have said "well-bred") to make the attempt. My apologies rang hollow, when I still bothered to voice them, but I gave her whatever she wanted, and most of the time what she wanted was to sing. i_Norma/i _was playing now and i_Faust/i_ had yet to open but she dug the upcoming season out of Richard. Despite his warning that her continued employment at the Opera was contingent upon her success in the upcoming production (and the absence of anything he termed "funny business") she insisted upon learning any part she might potentially be called upon to play. Between her voice and her body I was caught up in a delirious ecstasy of Christine. My obsession was made reality, and I found it not a whit less sweet for it. It was a perfect fusion of love and music, everything I had ever wanted, and it was marred only by the vacuum of her absence for several hours at a time, several days a week. Into that breach the daroga slid without comment, indeed without conscious plan. On my part, anyway; he was as inscrutable in his own way as I was reticent.

"And how is the old married man today?" We were in Box Five again; the auditorium was cleaned at night, and so during rehearsals we were in very little danger of being disturbed.

"Failing in his financial duties to his new wife," I said darkly. "I don't know what I'm going to do. I can't risk the Opera Ghost anymore; not with Christine's career and the elder Chagny's… disappearance. If I were alone, I might be able to manage. I suppose I can't live forever, after all. But women need things."

The daroga chuckled. "You were not very subtle, Erik. You had to know it couldn't last forever. Although it served those witless managers right if they hadn't the sense to figure it out. You should have tried blackmail. I know, for instance, that Moncharmin and La Carlotta are not altogether strangers to one another in the carnal sense. Or at least weren't; I'm not certain their passion will survive her recovery from hysterics." I stared at him in awe. Was this my dogged conscience? "Come now Erik, I was only kidding. About the blackmail, not about Moncharmin's dubious taste in women. If you're truly serious, I am sorry for you. You used to be so intelligent. For one thing, Christine is going to be a star. She's going to be able to command more than enough to keep herself and you quite comfortably."

"You know that's unacceptable."

He nodded. "Very well. At the risk of spelling out something terribly obvious then, I will remind you that the Opera Ghost business was unworthy of you. Parlor tricks and smoke and mirrors. You're worth more than that, and yet you've always survived on your basest talents. I've never understood that. How many unpublished concertos and operas do you have lying down there? How many useless bits of gears and wire are rusting away while Edison and the rest make a bundle patenting everything first?"

I stood up angrily. "You've never understood? i_You've/i_ never understood? Do I need to remind you why I've had to 'survive on my basest talents'?" I gestured to the mask and then, the desire to make my point overcoming my pride, ripped it away. "Because that's what I am, daroga. Base. Worthless. Unfit for the world the rest of you take for granted. And you dare to judge what I've done. You don't know anything about me, or my life, or what I've had to do and become to 'survive.'" He stared at me, unmoved.

"I never said it was simple," he said finally. He seemed indifferent to my face, though unlike Christine I didn't get the sense that he was ignoring the fact of its existence—just used to it. "But you aren't the only person who's had something in the way. I don't pretend to know where you came from or what happened to you, but there are plenty of eccentric businessmen who, for whatever reason, conduct their affairs through intermediaries. Just as there are women who must pretend to be men to find work, or foreign exiles who cannot get the time of day, much less a job, because half the people he meets think he's given them the evil eye. Of course, these misfortunes are insignificant compared to yours, but you're more intelligent than the rest of us, or so you've always wanted me to believe. You should be able to come up with something." Through the mocking tone I could almost hear something real, and I wondered for the very first time what he'd been doing the past fifteen years. What he did when he wasn't at the Opera.

I replaced the mask and sat next to him again. "I don't know. I can't seem to think clearly anymore. I can't think of anything besides her." I looked out at the stage where she was adjusting a costume for the benefit of the seamstress. The peasant girl bodice hugged her body without a corset to chaperone, and I supposed that peasants couldn't afford the decreased range of motion and breathing that fashion dictated but did the costumer have to be so realistic? It wasn't right for the contours of her body to be visible to anyone other than myself. Speaking of which, I was tempted to steal that costume after the run of the show.

"Erik? Are you still with me?" I realized he'd been talking. I turned vaguely back to him. "If you were trying to prove your point, you succeeded. You'll tell me it's none of my business, but Erik… Are you quite all right?" He looked at me with such concern it almost pained me, and I didn't know why.

"I have everything I've ever wanted," I said truthfully.

"Yes, yes, but are you happy?"

"She's perfect," I offered dreamily. "She's so innocent, daroga. So fresh and pure and sweet. You've known women, haven't you?"

He stifled a laugh. "You might say that."

I shook my head. "Not this one. Innocence you can taste. Can you love someone for their innocence, daroga?"

"Innocence has never held any appeal for me. But I think… I think you ought to love someone for who they are," he said slowly.

I nodded. "That's what she is. I'd be dead now, if not for her. But it's more than that." I knew I should stop talking but she'd grabbed hold of me. She was singing now, and her voice drew me out like a snake-charmer's pipe. "I needed her to save me. To make me human. I'm a man now, because of her. Because she accepted me as a woman does a man. My mother never touched me, you know. Not after that first, unavoidable part, and given the choice she'd have prevented that too. No one ever touched me, except perhaps to hit me as one hits a dog because it's the only language he understands. But she's the opposite. She doesn't understand hurt, can't comprehend pain or deceit or hatred. She can wash those things out of me. She has. I've never felt like this, daroga. Never." I imagined her here with me, both of us entwined on this very armchair of plush red velvet, and shuddered.

From the corner of my narrowed eyes I could see him staring at me but I couldn't discern his expression. "I hope you're right, Erik."

"Of course I'm right," I snapped. I was suddenly embarrassed at my weakness in confessing all that to him. Whatever momentary spell I'd been under had been broken and it now seemed private and inappropriate.

"Then I am very happy for you," he said slowly. "You just seem… well, distracted. And very thin."

I stared at him. "I'm always thin." And distraction was probably part of being mad, I almost added, but the great detective could probably figure that one out himself.

"And your mood's always changed directions faster than a sandstorm in the desert, but your clothes used to fit you better. You weren't always a skeleton, no matter what Meg Giry has to say about it."

"I don't see why she's an authority. She's never seen me naked. Neither have you, if it comes to that."

He laughed and fell suddenly silent, to my relief apparently willing to let my feeble attempt at humor close the subject. We sat without speaking for some minutes as the fat tenor below lamented a life spent in knowledge and study. The minute the rehearsal ended, however, my entire body stood as if at attention.

"Well. As fascinating as this has been, daroga, I am urgently required elsewhere." Or more accurately, there were parts of me which urgently desired to be elsewhere now that rehearsal was over.

He nodded and rose as well. Like we'd been having tea together and it required manners. "I have a name, you know. I don't go about calling you 'murderer' all the time."

"Once a policeman, always a policeman, daroga," I called back just before I closed the panel of the hollow column. I heard him mutter "idiot" when he thought I was gone, but he was wrong. The murderer had been leeched from me. I doubted anything could do the same for his sense of duty.

I hurried Christine through the cellars and passages, lamenting not for the first time the distance the secrecy of my home required us to travel every day. Why wait? I thought. Stairs and trapdoors and boats, it was all just wasted time. We didn't have time. She was going to disappear and I'd never see her again. What difference did home and bed make when we were racing against decay and death, two things I was all too familiar with? I stopped and pushed Christine against the wall.

"What? Is someone—"

I pressed my hand to her mouth. "Shh. Be still," I breathed in her ear. We were behind a flat of a pyramid and I wondered if the setting conferred onto me any of the majesty of the masked pharaohs. They were entombed with all they needed for their journey into the afterlife, just as I had been for a few short days before the stage lights had lured her away. In any case, she obeyed, and I soon was forced to entrust her silence to her. I had better things for my hands to do. I had to not only hold up the skirts of her dress and petticoats and whatever else but attempt to navigate the treacherous swells of lace and muslin that kept me from my goal. My harbor. The process was much easier for me, but I realized then that she was too short, or I was too tall, and I kicked to her feet the small discarded crate that lay nearby. "Stand," I ordered, and she did. In the dark I thought I could make out her lack of comprehension, but I couldn't be sure. She'd know soon enough.

It felt different this way, just as everything was new and different to me where she was concerned, and I had to put my hand over her mouth once more for fear she might be heard. The thought of someone walking by on the other side of the flat, the danger of discovery, made the joy that much sharper and I drew her legs around me to support her with the wall and my hands. I couldn't suppress my own growls of pleasure but I smothered them in the curve of her neck until, still panting, I handed her down from the box as I had watched gentlemen helping ladies from carriages at the subscriber's entrance. Her skirts fell at once to conceal everything that had occurred here and I led her swiftly back to the house, my lust only whetted.

When I was finally sated and she lay still next to me I thought again of how beautiful I had once found her in repose and tears came to my eyes. She'd been a sort of porcelain idol to me, free from time's ravages, but the reality of her death was my constant companion now, adding its voice to the incessant din of desire and jealousy which filled my head every waking moment.

"What is it, Erik?" she asked, finally turning towards me in her efforts to right her clothing.

"You're going to die," I said, caught stupidly without another excuse.

She stared at me, as if wondering if I was mad. Didn't she know? I'd always been mad, and if she had led me from my sickness it was only to a more pleasant one. "I'm not going to die, Erik," she explained as if to a child. "I'm not sick."

I shook my head. "But you will. One day, you will die. And I'll be alone again." Pathetic, that's what I was. But she knew it already, so there wasn't any point in disguising it.

She laughed like one who didn't believe death existed. "Don't be silly. I'm not going to die for a very long time. Although," she amended, changing subjects without concern for my agitation, "I might not make it to the opening of i_Faust/i_ if Richard keeps putting it off." At one time I would have been the first to know about any changes in schedule. In fact, at one time I'd have been the cause. Now I didn't even care to ask. Anything to keep her here with me, anything to keep her whole and mine for as long as possible.

Christine left me soon after to bathe, and I lay on her bed, dead to the world, for some minutes. My mind wandered over the years I'd spent here, all but vanished from the face of the earth, or was it banished? Either way, I'd reigned in this little underworld without thought of time or age or death, aside from what I myself brought about. To be conquered at last by that which I had mastered seemed ludicrous. Christine was supposed to be my goddess consort, as permanent as I, but something told me that was fantasy. Unless I did something first. It wasn't too late to kill her and thus preserve her in her prime. Perhaps after the opening, just after everyone had seen her triumph. Then she could live in the collective memory forever. Or as long as Opera lived and breathed, which would be so close to forever as to make no difference.

But the human brain was an inefficient record-keeper and memory was fleeting. What I needed was to preserve her, the essence of her, in some unchanging form. The body was weak and surrendered too quickly. The automatons I'd constructed for that idiotic sultan were dead things, children's toys, incapable of matching life in any meaningful way. What _was _Christine's essence, I wondered. What had drawn me to her, goaded me into life again? Her innocence? It was eternal, yes, but I couldn't bottle it. And it wasn't, I realized, what had first caught my attention. As if in reminder her voice issued from the bath, tripping as lightly as the bubbles I imagined covering her over some made up tune or country dance.

Her voice. If I were to distill her into one quality, it would be that, and it would be a substance of such absolute purity that alchemists of old would envy me from their graves. It matched her perfectly. She was her voice. She'd told me she couldn't live without singing, and I knew suddenly that though she had said it the way a spoiled child declares he will die without an ice cream it was true. There would be nothing left. And so that was what I would take from her, to keep more safely than she ever could because I understood what it all meant. She was merely the instrument.

I didn't have the knowledge to do it, though, and I fumed internally with impatience at my lack of options for acquiring it. The next day I was in my box before the daroga was, and when he entered he looked down in surprise at me as I sat expectantly in his usual armchair. Usually I made the greatest pretense of happening upon him in the box I visited every day as if by mere chance, even if had to crouch in that cramped column for half an hour.

"I need you to get something for me," I began without preamble. "Anything you can find on Edison's sound machine, or anyone else who might have come up with one. I've lost track."

He sat in the chair next to me and smiled with perfect calm. He'd always taken my abruptness with complete equanimity. Unless of course I was abruptly deciding to murder people or torture small children. "I'm glad to see you taking an interest in your work again, Erik. I was worried, with what you said about—"

"She's dying," I said, and though I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth it was vaguely amusing to watch his mask of stoicism slip. I couldn't seem to maintain any kind of control lately. I never used to surrender my emotions to anyone who came knocking. But then, it had been quite some time since anyone had.

"Surely not, Erik." He looked out at the stage, torn between pity and skepticism. "She looks quite healthy. A bit tired, perhaps, but she's been working hard and all the same she's a young woman in the prime of life. You must be mistaken."

"I'm not mistaken," I snapped. "She's dying a little every minute. Every day she gets older. Too soon, daroga, too soon she'll be gone and no matter how many souls I've sent to Hades I don't think I'll be able to go down and get her without looking back. I've never had that kind of self control."

"Ah."

I waited. "Well? Are you going to tell me I'm being foolish? That I'm much older than she? That in any case I ought to enjoy the time I have with her now?"

He smiled gently. "It wouldn't do any good. Besides, I cannot tell you how to feel. I understand, somewhat. Living your life, getting on to the end of it and finally realizing what you wanted all along and wishing you'd had the chance to have it, or at least know what it was, before it was too late to enjoy it fully."

I blinked at him, both relieved at not being laughed out of the room and surprised by his wistful tone. "What do you want, daroga?" I never thought about him needing anything. He just was.

He shrugged and his smile turned rueful. "I don't know. I suppose that's my tragedy. But what was it you wanted, Erik? You were asking me for something. I'm going to take a chance and assume that your outburst was not completely unrelated to your request."

"I want her voice, daroga. I mean, I want to preserve it. If I can do that, I have her forever. Edison's made a machine that can reproduce sound—"

"I've heard of it. Well, I will certainly see what I can find. I suppose you'll be needing materials as well."

I nodded. "Yes. Wire especially; there's no electric here except for my home so I can't steal that as easily." I stopped suddenly. He'd all but offered to go shopping for me. "Wait. What do you want?"

He laughed. "I have to have an ulterior motive?" He looked at me again. "With you, I suppose I have to. It's true I'd rather see you doing for yourself. I don't think it's good, spending all of one's time between these walls. But on the other hand, your version of doing for yourself tends towards the destructive. I need some occupation anyway. I don't mind."

"You would do this for me?" I couldn't help but think that his stated intention of keeping me law-abiding was a pretense, and my mind couldn't accept his offer. I was amazed. He'd wanted to kill me. I thought. Or turn me in, or see me hanged, I never quite knew. Perhaps he'd realized that he'd be even more bored when I was gone.

He nodded. "It's nothing. Just… just let me hear it, when you're done."

I hesitated, then nodded. It was a little enough thing to grant, if that was all he wanted. But I suspected that empires fell by little things, in increments, like my slow retreat into my hermetic sanctuary here. Which over the past year had, in its turn, been moving by degrees towards something more like a railway terminus. Well, it was too late to worry about that now. I had more important things to think about. And he already knew where I lived anyway.

I hardly ever thought about killing him anymore.


	9. Chapter 9

Over the next several days I eagerly received an education in piecemeal, the daroga feeding me with morsels taken from journals, newspapers, even a few monographs which had been written on the subject of sound reproduction.

"How did you find this?" I asked him, glancing over a thick packet of results from various experiments.

He returned my gaze stoically. "I'm not without resources. There's a university library close to where I live."

"And they let just anyone walk in off the street and take their manuscripts?" By then I had begun to detect guilt. "Daroga, you didn't! How could you, as an upholder of the law?"

He snorted. "All the better to break them. You really are quite dense at times." My smile grew wider as his frown deepened and I began to laugh. "It's not funny, Erik. I'm not the complete puritan I sometimes think you make me out to be." By the time he finished he was laughing too and as I left I shook his hand.

"Welcome to the land of the damned," I said. "I must return to my laboratory in hell. I want to start experimenting with her voice soon. If you keep up your life of depravity I suppose you'll be joining me soon enough." Still chuckling, I returned home. I hated leaving her alone but I had things to do and I found it difficult to concentrate with her in the house.

My mirth was short-lived, however. I had followed Edison's plans initially, knowing I would improve upon his model but sensing the value of standing on another man's shoulders. It was quite clever really: it relied on the conversion of sound vibrations to mechanical ones and then, when played back, converting the mechanical dips into vibrations which reached the ear as sound. The sound, shouted into a cone which caused the waves to hit a diaphragm which moved a stylus up and down in a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a cylinder which was turned with a crank. The playback needle merely read the bumps in the foil rather than making them, and the precise reproduction of the diaphragm's movements was supposed to faithfully imitate what was put into it.

But it didn't. While Christine was out, I made my initial test:

_And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side  
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,  
In the sepulcher there by the sea,  
In her tomb by the sounding sea._

It was the first thing to come to my mind. I'd been reading Poe lately, trying to get Christine interested in him. With the giddy impatience of a schoolboy ten minutes before a holiday I replaced the stylus and turned the crank. What came out was a pitiful, scratchy, thoroughly weak echo of my one true glory. Its ugliness shocked me, offended my ears and my sensibilities and shattered (momentarily) my ambitions. This was the great invention? This? It was nothing, meant nothing. As a tool of communication the printed word was eminently more suitable. If one wished to hear a person's voice, to _know_ them through the qualities of pitch and timbre and range, this was useless. It had nothing of the character of human speech, nothing to make it worthwhile.

Unless. Unless this _was_ a faithful reproduction. Who knew what the ears or the brain might create in one with so much imagination? Perhaps my voice was my greatest delusion, and any joy I'd received from it had been one grand illusion designed to give me something, anything, to feel good about. Or perhaps it was sheer vanity. The need to have one gift to set me apart from humanity so that I could ignore the fact that they had set me apart from themselves.

The thought brought me to my study and my chair, my hands twitching from desire to destroy the blasted thing. It was simply too horrible to consider, but I did it anyway, substituting that tinny growl for what I had considered my only beauty. Was that the voice of a ghost? Had I seduced the minds of queens and molded the wills of princes with that ungodly howl? _What is it, mother?_ I'd asked her when, in a spiteful fit, she'd dragged me to her full-length mirror. _That's you, you stupid child! I knew you were the ugliest brat who ever walked the earth. Didn't the devil see fit to give you a brain inside that filthy head of yours?_ Then, as now, I'd refused to believe the reflection had anything to do with me.

But unlike then, I didn't have her standing over me and yelling. I could think properly. I had to. It couldn't be right, I reasoned. I _was_ the Angel of Music. I had enough external evidence of my vocal prowess. I'd made my living on it, and no one would pay for the kind of din which had emanated from the machine. I rose slowly and went back to my workshop to stare down at the hated contraption. Looking at it now, it seemed primitive indeed. Now that I saw how it was put together, I could also see how it could be improved. If one was careful about insulation, there was no reason one could not install a motor in it and avoid hand-cranking, which would lead to distortion of the sound when it was replayed at a different speed than it was recorded in. I had enough experience with gears and electricity to do that, easily. And the materials involved: if its operation was dependent upon sound vibrations, clearly very subtle in their differences, the materials to catalog their changes had to be capable of subtlety as well. Why tin, after all? It was a question of delicacy. And another thing, the inscribing itself. Edison had the stylus moving up and down, like a woodpecker. This required a greater force than if the stylus was positioned to move back and forth over the surface, creating its account like a stone skipping across a pond, and I reasoned that taking that burden off the instrument would increase its ability to record more accurately.

When I had calmed down enough to read the other papers the daroga had brought me, I had still more ideas. Some poet here in Paris had dreamed up a similar machine which used etched glass, and Edison himself had first considered waxed paper instead of foil, or a flat disc as a recording surface, which he had since abandoned. But there might be something to them.

It took so long, though. I'd never noticed the hours I spent in perfecting my little projects, because they filled my time and my thoughts and I'd always worked at something until it was done. But now there was Christine to take care of, and the thought of her shadowed my every move, lengthening every moment spent without her until it felt like perpetual twilight when she was away, that time of day your eyes can adjust neither to the light or the dark.

"I made dinner!" I glanced up, startled. Christine stood in the doorway of my study in a dress of pale pink I could not remember seeing that day, but then I couldn't quite remember which day it was or how long I'd been toiling away at this ultimately pointless venture.

"Christine. When did you get back?" Had I forgotten to meet her? It was incredible; the travesty of the phonograph had dulled my brain as well as offended my ears. It would likely make me deaf too if I kept at it. The rest of my body had not been similarly afflicted, however, and my blood leapt up as if to meet her. A lonely dog left too long without its master.

"You weren't there," she pouted. "So I came down and I heard you in here. I know you don't like being disturbed, so I cooked instead. But I worry about you, Erik. You don't eat enough."

"I believe your ideas of how much is 'enough' were warped by whatever farmwife brought you up, my love."

"But I wasn't… You're making fun of me again, Erik." Well, I supposed it was too much to expect her to grow a sense of humor.

"Yes, I am. Besides, it's your fault. You drive all thought of food right out of my head." I drifted closer, project momentarily abandoned though I suspected it would continue to cycle through my thoughts at an uneven speed roughly analogous to the hand crank which powered it. My obsessions had to fight for audience these days. "You're so much sweeter," I whispered, my head bent to bring my mouth level with her ear. "I starve without you, my angel. Every minute you're away. That's what you should worry about. Not food. You're all I need."

My body pressed itself to hers of its own accord, convenient given that it saved my will the bother. "I made dinner," she offered feebly, but I was deaf indeed. The sensation of feeling her this close, but still as far away as several layers of clothing could keep us, was maddening. Just as maddening as that stupid toy in there, as maddening as the daroga's pesky little inquiries, as maddening as the world I no longer had even the desire to rejoin, despite what I had told Christine of my plans if only she'd consent to be my wife. It was all a lie, because once I had her I desired nothing else. I had the sun and the moon and when I removed her clothes the light of both blinded me even as I guided her to the piano bench. I laid her down along its length so that she was completely exposed to me, on display like a rare butterfly never discovered before or since. Mine to claim and catalog and name.

No, not a butterfly. A bird. A songbird, a golden canary, in a cage of marble I had built (with some minor aid of M. Garnier, of course) before I'd even known of her existence. Whose voice I'd fallen in love with before I ever knew of what else her lovely mouth was capable. But I had quickly remedied that ignorance and now she complied to my silent demands without a murmur. As much under her spell as I was I was still in control, at least here and now. I could do anything I wanted, have anything I wanted, feel every nuance of her body in every cell of mine. I could conduct her here as I always had in our lessons. I might be enchanted by her, but she belonged to me.

And yet it was never enough. Or rather, I always wanted more. Peace lasted mere seconds, and then my doubts and obsessions and plans and fears returned, redoubled and regrouped in military formation. I was no match for them. Even now, as I sat with my back against one leg of the bench, I was contemplating the coming night and the rehearsal schedule and the phonograph and the daroga and when, in all this, I might get to taste her flesh again because like a drug too long taken I found myself craving her more every day.

"Erik?" I glanced up sharply. "Are you alright?" Her skin was flushed and she looked as if she'd been running outside in the cold. Well, except for being naked, of course. She touched one warm hand to my shoulder, which happened to be within reach.

"Fine, Christine," I said, then amended, "Perfect."

She smiled and began drawing her clothes to her. "Dinner's probably still good," she said, then wrinkled her nose. "Well, I'm not sure if it started out good. But I'm getting better. Aren't I?"

"You are," I assured her. "Much better. Do you enjoy it?"

"I enjoy making you proud of me," she said. "Sometimes I like it."

Sometimes? I wanted to bury myself in her until she screamed for me, and—but we were talking about cooking. "When I don't forget things and ruin all that work." I tried to bring my thoughts back to the matter at hand, which was apparently food. Nothing could shake her sense of mealtime. "You're doing wonderfully, Christine." I pulled my trousers on.

"How would you know? You never eat anything I make."

"I don't eat anything at all, my love. It's not you." I wondered how we were having this conversation in the aftermath of passion, with clothes decorating the landscape like lost sheep after a raid by wolves and flesh still peeking immodestly from around corners. "Wouldn't you like a bath first?" I suggested, trying to preserve some level of decorum. I thought baths were decorous. Certainly with the plumbing I'd perfected they counted as one of the modern world's greatest triumphs.

She shrugged and tossed her hair loose only to begin pinning it up again. "I can take one later." Did any of it matter to her? Or was this a testament to her level of comfort with me? I didn't know and couldn't ask and so my mind oscillated wildly between delusional optimism and the most suspicious despair, leaving me somewhere in the middle with no firm ground to stand on.

So I swallowed down what she gave me and listened to her chatter on about rehearsals and gossip and despite the fact that the food seemed to be descending into a bottomless pit completely unconnected with my digestive system, I decided that she was comfortable with me. She was comfortable here. She had what she wanted, didn't she? Or anyway she would once the production opened. She looked alive. Not like the withdrawn, simple girl I'd seen first who seemed to be intent upon following her father into the grave. And while I had loved her then, I could also love her easy prattle, her innocent enthusiasm, her unselfish ambition.

Not for long stretches of time, however. Soon the unsolved problems of the phonograph began grumbling at me, the pitch rising to the squawking buzz of the lines it had recited back to me. There was only so much I could hear about who was courting Cécile Jammes now, or what silly prank Meg Giry had played on her mother, or the string of men who came and went out of La Sorelli's dressing room. Although I suspected that the illustrious dancer's protestations of cards and company told something less than the whole truth.

I finally let Christine pull me from my workshop to bed that night, but not without making my own demands in return. I'd never slept very much, and I was increasingly restless now unless I made some effort at achieving calm.

All the next morning I spent in the workshop until, coming across a sketch I'd done on some blueprint, I remembered Christine. I vaguely recalled her knocking and me brushing her away like a tiresome child, but I supposed she'd gone to rehearsal. I hurried above, wondering how I could have ignored her absence for so long. When I arrived in my box I discovered that rehearsal had just ended, so I went swiftly to her dressing room, risking the door rather than the mirror for the sake of expediency. She wasn't there. She hadn't been on stage. Panic rose within me and I was about to throw the door open again, heedless of anyone in the corridor, when I heard voices. Two voices; hers and a man. A voice I knew all too well.

"Get in here, you fool!" The mirror opened and I had a view of what it must have looked like to that stupid confused schoolboy when I whisked her away before his eyes. An arm snaked out and drew me into the dark space, and in my surprise I did not resist.

I blinked in the half-light at the daroga. "What are you doing here?"

"Shh! They're coming."

The door opened and a flustered looking Christine entered, followed closely by the last man I ever wanted to see on earth. I put my hand out to trip the mechanism again but my companion was faster and I found the way blocked.

"Get out of my way or I'll kill you too!" I said. I was furious and heartbroken and I hated him in this moment, hated anyone who kept me from killing the Vicomte de Chagny as was my duty.

"I won't." Even in the dimness his eyes glittered. "You're not going to kill him."

"The hell I'm not!" I cried, but my attention was caught by an answering shout from the other side.

"You're being foolish, Christine. I demand that you give up this childishness!" The blond Adonis was ugly when he was angry, I noticed. All blotchy and red. Like he'd been drinking.

"I told you I never wanted to see you again, Raoul. Not here, not outside. Nowhere." The coldness in her voice was something I'd never heard from her before.

"Goddamnit, daroga, let me kill him! Even you know he deserves it." Why was I arguing with him? I didn't need his permission. I started struggling but he was doing a fairly good job of holding his ground. It might take a few minutes to get past him. I wrapped my fingers around his throat.

"But why, Christine? I love you. You love me. I don't understand."

"You never understood, Raoul. That's your problem. I can't give this up. If you knew me at all, if you loved me, you'd know that."

"He's not worth it, Erik!" the Persian whispered. "And if you ask my opinion, neither is she."

I tightened my grip on his throat until I could hear the air struggling to pass through. "You ought to know better, daroga. I've killed men for far less than that."

"What? So I should let you strut around on stage like… like one of my brother's whores?" My chest tightened at Chagny's words. Death, however slow and torturous and humiliating I could make it, was too good for him.

Her eyes seemed as bright as gas flames. "Is that what you think of me? No wonder I left! You say you love me, Raoul, but it's not enough to get beyond that. That's what I am. This is where I belong. I'm happy to be a wife but it's not enough."

"It used to be, I'd warrant. Until _he_ came along. That's where all this is coming from, isn't it? My god, you even sound like him. He's dead and you're still letting him dominate you."

When the daroga spoke it was barely a sigh. "I didn't risk my life to save you only to have you throw it away again."

"I see. So this is for my benefit?" I asked. "Because I thought you had come out of retirement. You're a little out of your jurisdiction, aren't you?" My grip was slipping as I watch the two behind the glass. I still wanted to kill the little bastard but part of me wondered what she would say.

"That's not who I am anymore, Erik. You saw to that. You have no idea what I want." The Persian's vehemence matched Christine's and their words seemed to mingle and feed off each other in a strange organic symbiosis.

"He has nothing to do with this, Raoul," Christine spat. "Except perhaps in showing me what I was missing with you. He loved me for who I could be, not who I was ten years ago."

"Perhaps you will enlighten me, then," I goaded him. "Perhaps you've come to make sure your little charity case hadn't gone and made your sacrifice a mockery."

"In a way, yes. But not in the way you think. I risked my life so that you could have one. There is so much you are capable of. I couldn't be responsible for denying you or the world another chance. I was trying to make sure you didn't throw away your life. The life I gave you." So damned earnest. What cause did he have to believe good about anybody?

"So, what?" my other nemesis was asking. "Some monster gets a hold of you for a few nights and now I'm not good enough anymore? He's warped your mind, Christine. You don't know what you're saying. What are you hiding from me? Where have you been? Did he… did he do something to you, before I got there? Was I too late?"

"What do you want me to say, daroga? That I'm grateful? That I never realized what my life was worth until you so beneficently granted it to me? Or that half the time I wish you'd killed me so I wouldn't have had to live through the past fifteen years? She's the one who saved me, daroga, not you."

"You?" she laughed. "You have me to thank that you're still alive. You only made things worse. _I_ saved _you_."

Raoul shook his head. "You're insane, Christine. Or should I say, Mademoiselle Daae. I didn't expect you to be like the rest of them. I thought you wanted a normal life. I thought you were the girl with the scarf. But you're not. You've changed, and your father would be heartbroken. Do you know that? You don't have to worry about me coming back here. Does that make you happy?"

"Is that so? Tell me, Erik, is it any different now? Is the rage any more manageable? Is the hurt any less?"

No, I realized, not really, just channeled differently, funneled into her like a cyclone permanently touched down on one hapless family's home. "Why do you care, daroga? You've already ruined your own life over me. Why spend the rest of it fussing over what I choose to do with mine?"

He stared at me, a doubt I'd never seen in him clouding the usually smooth contours of his face. "I don't know!" he shouted finally. At the same time the door to Christine's dressing room slammed shut and she looked up, startled, as if she'd heard us. It was as if a spell had been broken, and all my murderous rage, assuaged by the other man's sleight of hand, returned in force. I shoved him against the wall and let go.

"Get out of here," I growled and stepped through the mirror, not waiting to see if he followed my command. I didn't care anyway. He could watch for all it mattered to me at this moment. This was about me. And her.

"Erik!" She looked frightened, and that was all it took to push me over the edge.

"Lock the door," I commanded quietly, and she obeyed without a word, glancing over her shoulder at me as she crossed the room. "What am I supposed to make of this, Christine?" I asked rhetorically. "You asked him to come here."

She shook her head, her back to the door. "No. He came here, he followed me back. I told him to leave me alone."

"You must not have told him clearly enough." I knew I was being unreasonable. I wasn't completely insensible of it. She had gotten rid of him, and my blaming her for his attempt to win her back wasn't going to work in my favor. But the part of me that could act, could speak, wasn't in communication with the rest of me.

"But I did! He even mentioned you and I didn't say anything. I don't want to go back to him, Erik. I've told you so many times. I'm staying with you. I don't go back on my word."

"But you did, Christine, you did! Remember, on the roof? All your little plans with him, all your broken promises to me." I was drawing closer to her and like a shark after a shipwreck I smelled blood.

She shook her head stubbornly. "I was wrong then, I know. I was confused and scared but I still came back."

"Two weeks later. That's quite a lot of time, Christine. Are you sure I heard the whole story just now? How do I know nothing else happened? How can I be sure?" I was directly in front of her now, and she stumbled back and caught herself on her dressing table.

"You were the first, Erik. Honestly." She was right, of course, it was obvious, but logic just wasn't that important to me anymore. How I felt was, because it was as if I had a furnace inside and every word she said, every gesture she made were like fuel only as usual I had no idea if I was supposed to fall at her feet or break her neck.

"And the last," I whispered in her ear, my breath disturbing the tendrils around her face. "Say it."

"The last," she repeated breathlessly. Suddenly she drew herself up, her previously evasive and unfocused eyes targeting mine. "I sent him away, Erik. If you were listening, as I assume you were, you should know that." I was a bit startled by her calm, but there was something arousing about her show of strength. I picked her up and deposited her on the red velvet divan she used for naps before shows, or whatever divas did to relax. Her clothes were the work of mere moments, as were mine, and then I was inside her, hotter and faster and more vital and basic than ever. She was so beautiful, laid out on the plush cushions, red as the blood which had made her mine in the first place.

"Mine… mine… mine…" I repeated, not sure if I was speaking aloud or not but reaching for something I needed more than anything in the world. And wonder of wonders, she reached for me, holding my face in her hands as she stared into my eyes.

"I'm yours," she said simply, and I thought I heard her cry out but it was drowned by my own shout of completion.

I looked down at her, still propped with my hands on either side of her, and saw tears leaking from the corners of her eyes. Guilt hit me instantly. "Christine, did I hurt you? Oh god, forgive me. I shouldn't have accused you. I should have listened. Can you ever forgive me?"

"You didn't hurt me, Erik," she said, but she sounded sad and tired and drew me down to lay with my head on her breast. I could hear her heart beating quickly and I remembered how mine always did so during a fight. Did our bodies not know the difference?


	10. Chapter 10

My life had telescoped into the service of two basic urges: creation and pursuit of pleasure. Everything else was beyond my visibility. I stopped going above, even for Christine's rehearsals, only leaving my work to meet her in her dressing room. When the need for pleasure was assuaged for the time being I went back to my gears and wires and plans, where I would work until Christine dragged me out for dinner only to whet my appetite for her. An endless cycle, both functions turning me in place without accomplishing anything, like the slow spiral of the stylus on the flat disc I'd adopted instead of a cylinder.

I didn't even noticed the daroga's absence until there came a knock on the door one day while Christine was out. I considered not answering it but suddenly I couldn't remember when I'd seen him last and it made me curious.

"Where have you been?"

"I might ask you the same, Erik." His eyes held a glittering intensity I recognized, reminding me finally that I had seen him last behind her mirror. Where he'd questioned her worth. "I thought you might be avoiding me. I wanted to apologize for the things I said."

I waved a negligent hand. "You were just trying to keep me from killing him in front of her. You were right. Besides, I know you know better than to say anything against her at this point."

He sighed, but didn't contradict me. "May I come in?"

I laughed. "How many times must you ask before you memorize the answer? But I'll come out." I turned and shut the door. It was nearly invisible in the wall and I wondered how he'd found it.

Once I'd agreed to talk, he seemed curiously hesitant, and we walked in silence along the concrete bank of the lake for a few minutes. "How are your experiments coming?" he asked at last.

I shrugged. "Slowly. Something's just not quite right. I understand the principles and I can build something that replicates sounds to a recognizable degree, but it's just not… right. I haven't tried it with her yet. The disappointment would be too much."

"You've set yourself an impossible task, Erik. You can't ever capture something that personal and complicated."

"I can!" I replied indignantly.

"You can't really ever capture anyone," he said quietly, ignoring my outburst. "Or understand them, for that matter, no more than you can understand yourself or why you do anything."

"Are you certain you're feeling well?" I wondered briefly if he was mad, and then I looked more closely at his face. "You've been drinking."

"For some time, now." He stopped and looked at me. "Shocked?" he asked.

I nodded. "I thought… I mean I'd always assumed… the laws of your faith…"

"Yes, the good little Moslem, I," he laughed. "It's worth it to shock you, I suppose. It's your fault anyway."

"My fault that I'm shocked, or my fault you're drunk?" He'd thrown me off balance, I had to admit.

"That I'm here at all! That I came to this tiresome, bigoted country, that I risked my life and lost everything else for you, that I follow you around like a stray besotted puppy—"

"Besotted puppy?" I repeated, not sure I'd heard him right. "It's not my fault you felt like exercising your overdeveloped conscience on me."

"It's not my conscience," he said with a quiet insistence, as if he was trying to work it out as he spoke but wanted desperately for me to understand. "I had to ask myself why I had done any of it. I never really knew, all these years. At first I told myself it was some kind of principle, some altruistic higher good. Like that was for me to decide. As if by my saying it your sins could miraculously be made to matter less than my sacrifice. As if the balance would be righted somewhere, when in reality I didn't even care. It's all so very selfish, and I didn't even recognize it until I saw you… until I saw you with her, and I realized how jealous I am of her."

I blinked. "Christine? I never thought you were that fond of her." Whether that spoke more strongly for his blindness or his sense of self-preservation I wasn't sure.

"I'm not. That is, I think you—that's not the point. I'm not jealous of you having her. I'm jealous of her. Of the way you feel about her, the way you look at her, the way everything else disappears for you. I can hardly make you aware of me when I'm right in front of you. I asked for your friendship, Erik, but it's not… it's not what I want." His eyes flicked up to my face and back down and I suddenly recalled all the times we'd crouched in the dark together, the games of chess, the conversations, the utter loneliness that radiated from the man in waves. I remembered the dank little hole behind the mirror and refused to think further about how I didn't know if he'd left that day because I wasn't certain I wanted to know the answer. "I know it's wrong and I don't pretend to understand it myself. I tried avoiding you but you made it too easy. I could disappear tomorrow and you'd never think of me again but you've altered my life irrevocably, and it infuriates me that my whole life hasn't been worth just one moment of hers."

I swallowed, uncertain of what to say or even whether to say anything. Surely it would be easier to just walk back home and lock the door. Never see him again. Never have to confront these things he was saying because I didn't understand them but I didn't hate him either and that was the part that worried me. "You did get me out of Persia," I said before I had a chance to think about it. "I didn't mean those things I said before. Well, I did then, but I don't now. But I don't understand what you're saying. I don't want to think about this, daroga."

He snorted at the mention of my name for him, or perhaps it was my easy dismissal of unwanted thoughts. "I'll go, Erik. I shouldn't have come in the first place. Go back to her. I'll… I'll see you, soon. I value your friendship, Erik. I hope I haven't lost it."

I shook my head dumbly and he turned and walked away, alone and suddenly much older looking. I felt pity for him more than anything else, because I had something he didn't. Rumored dalliances with certain members of the opera company aside, I wondered if he'd always been alone. I knew firsthand the frustration of that. But it didn't make any sense, I mused as I turned slowly homewards. He'd always been a tower of principle and morality. The only really good man I knew of. Christine, beyond such earthly distinctions, did not count. He must be mad, I concluded. Deceived in his emotions by too many years living alone, as I had been in the madness before Christine came back of her own will. How could I be other than his enemy when I represented the opposite of all he stood for? But he'd said we'd never been enemies and if I cared to examine it I could find a completely valid and opposite reason for all of his actions.

If I cared to. But this was his misfortune, not mine, and while I granted him a sympathy I had never before allowed another man, I had better things to attend to. And perhaps it had merely been the alcohol speaking and he would never bring it up again. Thus comforted, I went back to work. It was slow but I was improving the contraption little by little and I wanted to start recording her with it. I really wouldn't know until then if I'd accomplished anything at all.

When she knocked that evening to remind me to eat, I asked her to come in. "Would you like to know what I've been working on?"

She hesitated a moment, but only just, and smiled. "You have been working a lot, haven't you?"

I nodded. "I think you're going to like it." I presented the phonograph, with modifications, to her. She gazed at it silently, not bothering to mask her incomprehension. "It's called a phonograph. It records sounds so that you can hear them whenever you want."

She looked up at me, still puzzled. "What kind of sounds?"

"Any kind. Well, I haven't finished making all the adjustments, but I don't see why one couldn't record anything at all. Birds singing, lectures, books, letters, operas… I suppose eventually one will be able to hear any piece of music he wants without leaving his house. Perhaps even while it's being performed."

Christine frowned. "This is what you've been doing? But why? You have the opera upstairs, you can go any time you like."

"I would like to record you, my love."

"But you can hear me any time you like! Every day. Why do you need a machine to do it too?"

This wasn't going as planned, but I knew there was no malice in it. Technology, the march of progress, held little appeal for someone who would have lived happily in her past had her father's death not made that impossible. "Because… because I want to preserve you. Your voice, that is. I want to capture it so it can never be forgotten. You deserve that, Christine."

Her shrug seemed to imply that the future didn't concern her any more than it did a cat and I knew it was useless talking to her about it. I would make her a present of the finished disc and then she'd see what a marvelous service to humanity I was capable of providing that did not involve ridding it of useless aristocrats. I could be useful and good and it would be like giving her what she'd given me, which was surely a selfless gesture worthy of even the daroga's high standards. Which, suddenly, I wondered if I ought to measure anyone against anymore.

"Shall we eat, love?" I asked, and she nodded, also not hiding the relief that seemed to reanimate her once she was freed from my attempts to make her understand my curious and unnatural tinkering. Odd, that the fantastic reality of the world and what it was made of and what it was capable of becoming in our hands meant nothing to her, when she thrived on tales of outrageous fancy. After dinner I told her the tale of Orpheus. She'd heard it before, but she enjoyed it so and I liked the way her head would dip to lean upon my shoulder as I spoke. She thought it was terribly romantic and I was careful to stop before the end because the thought of Orpheus wandering about and charming everyone with his perfect voice while never overcoming his guilt made her more pliable than ever when I led her to bed. I'd noticed that she preferred stories of doomed love or heroine saviors better than princes on white horses. Or at least, I had learned that the former were somewhat more effective, if my interests were taken into consideration.

It was like learning a new instrument, this business of carnal pleasure. Two, actually: hers and mine, and my talent seemed to grow daily. I had plenty of creativity to lend to this new endeavor, and I found I could coax her into nearly anything I could dream about. And that fact, the sheer power mixed with pleasure, was enough to release any guilt I might feel about it. I could make her sigh and I could make her blush and that flush of innocence was all it took to goad me further. And in her infinite compassion she always forgave me. She never struggled when my jealously prompted me to take her as soon as she walked into her dressing room, never cried out when my nocturnal fantasies demanded realization and she awoke already cradling me within her. It was as if her body was the vessel for my sins, a safe repository for things I could entrust to no other because in her they were washed clean and forgotten. Immaculate and antiseptic and every day I was certain I could never want her more but then the next day came and I was proven wrong. But I wondered about something the daroga had said, something about the rage being more manageable, the pain less. Was I good now only because she distracted me from doing evil? Did the fact that the pain now registered as pleasure make it any better?

Oh yes, I decided. Absolutely. There is nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so. Except for Christine, of course, who could never be other than what she was. She could deal out the deepest anguish and I would fall at her feet and beg for more. Nothing could touch her, but anything she touched was good. Even me. Even what I felt and what I did and what she inspired in me. To hold back, I decided, would be to second guess her power. Blasphemy. I had given myself to her and she would have every last drop.

The next morning I was distracted in my work by her humming. It was a pleasant sound, and it reminded me of when I'd wake to the sound of birds calling to each other after a night under the stars. Although I was past the point in my life I'd give up my bed and my home and my comfort for it. Luckily I had it all.

"And what has you so cheerful this morning, my love?" I asked her, coming out to lean against the doorframe. She smiled prettily and I thought perhaps that I would buy her a new dress so as to see that smile again.

"Just excited. Faust opens on Friday."

I was silent a moment as I tried to remember what day it was. Monday. That gave me five days to perfect the phonograph and have her sing into it, preferably without her knowing what I was doing. I wanted it to be a surprise. I was working on the microphone, the device which picked up the sound itself, trying to find something that would reproduce the sounds more delicately.

"You're going to astonish them all. Again." Of course, hopefully not because of another spectacular disappearance from the stage. "With your singing," I amended.

"You are coming, aren't you?"

"How could you suggest I might miss it?" I asked in mock horror.

"You're always working," she said. "You're always in there, playing with things." She didn't even sound petulant, just confused, as if she really didn't understand and was just curious.

I drew her to me and held her close. "I wouldn't be anywhere else, Christine. You know that." She nodded. "You know I love you." From here I could see the tops of her breasts and the shadow between them just beyond the collar of her dressing gown. I reached out to trace their contours with the tips of my fingers. "I would never let you go in front of all those people alone. I'll always be with you, Christine. Remember that. Wherever you are, I am as well. You know that too, don't you?" She nodded again, her eyes demurely downcast, and my breath started coming faster. It seemed like so long ago that this loss of control had alarmed me; now I welcomed the release from responsibility. It wasn't a loss of control, really. I was putting myself into her hands, that was all. "Lean over the sofa," I commanded, my voice harsh and undeniable. I folded her over the arm and slid the silk up her legs. I was confused by the lack of undergarments but I supposed she'd merely been tired when she woke and had forgotten to put them on. It made the dull, faded bruises more apparent. The marks of my fingers that I had tried to heal with my kisses and tears stood out against flesh almost as pale as my own and I was going to make more now, I was certain, the way I was gripping her hips to mine as if I might drown without her to anchor me. I just might. She could swallow me up and I'd never know the difference, and perhaps I ought to let her, come to that.

My fingers dug into her flesh and I leaned over her, my breath moving the tendrils at the back of her neck. "Remember me, when you're on that stage," I growled softly. "Remember me with every ovation, every bouquet, every blasted notice you read in the paper. They're all me, Christine, every last one of them. There is no one but me, Christine. You'll remember, won't you? You mustn't forget… mustn't forget… Ah god, Christine!"

I forced myself to move when she started squirming underneath my prostrate body. She rose and the dressing gown slipped down again, completing the picture of pristine beauty as she glanced at the clock. "Rehearsal!" she said gaily, kissing me swiftly on the forehead before she disappeared into the other room, presumably to dress. I sighed, satisfaction already slipping away as I turned to the workroom. She darted in before leaving to tell me that she'd convinced them to let her have Box 5 for her "family."

"They tried to get me to choose another. I think they think I'm superstitious. But I couldn't have you sitting anywhere else."

My reaction surprised me. Box 5 was mine to dispose of, and no one else's. Not even her. The Opera Ghost had really served to sharpen my edge and I was growing duller every day. I resisted the urge to vent my irritation. "That's very thoughtful of you, Christine. But you know I can afford the seat myself."

She laughed as if that was the funniest thing ever to come out of my mouth. "But Erik, you don't need to do all that anymore. I know all about how you got that box before. But you have me now."

There was no working after that. Inspiration was short that morning anyway, and after she left I found myself thinking only of her on that stage, of what would happen, what would start, on Friday. All those eyes, all those people wanting something from her, while she was intent on providing for me! I couldn't let her out of my sight, and I finally resigned myself to watching the rehearsal. At least today.

The Persian was already in his accustomed seat. His impassive face was as inscrutable as ever but I wasn't going to mention yesterday if he didn't bring it up. I had to say something, though, I supposed. "Who's that?" I asked of a conveniently unfamiliar man sitting off by the side of the stage.

He looked up at me, silent for a moment. "A painter, I'm told. I'm surprised you haven't seen him. So far all he does is observe the ballet rats."

"I thought that was your job," I said lightly.

"Not anymore," he muttered, but I had the uncomfortable feeling it was more of a personal matter he referred to than the indignity of being usurped. "Well sit, if you're going to stay."

"Such manners, and in my own private box as well." I sat anyway. "Headache?"

He glared at me, but then his look softened. "Is the phonograph giving you trouble?"

I watched her tiny figure move through the lines of the country dance being rehearsed. "It's almost ready. I think. It's not going to be perfect, but then I've always expected too much. But it has to be done by Friday."

"The opening? But why?"

I shrugged. "I keep thinking about them, daroga. About everyone who's going to see her that night. Who will want her and try to take her from me. I can't stand it; I had to be here even now, watching her, instead of working where I should be. That's why it has to be finished. So that some little part of her will be mine forever. She doesn't understand that about me. She doesn't know how much I need her."

"I'm sure she does, Erik," he said gently.

"She can't. No one can." I stared sightlessly in front of me, my voice hushed and urgent. "I think about her all the time, daroga. I can't think about anything else. It's worse now… worse than before she came back. Worse now that I've had her. I can't get close enough to her, or stay close long enough, or… It's torture, daroga, but it's worth it even if it kills me. Sometimes I want her to kill me. Or to kill her. I can't remember which right now." I shouldn't have been saying this to him, of all people, who knew what I was capable of, but somehow I didn't mind. I couldn't talk to her this way. She'd be horrified. And he might be too, but at least he'd listen. No one else ever listened. I risked a glance his way and found his cool eyes studying me. "I don't want her dead, you understand. That's not what I—"

He smiled. "I know, Erik. I'm not a policeman anymore. You might remember that I was never terribly effective even when I was. You seem to think I'm analyzing your conversation for signs of wrongdoing. I'm not your conscience or your jailer or your priest. I'm a friend. I don't know how many times I have to tell you."

I nodded and looked back at the stage, the silence stretching between us disconcerting in its very comfort. Could familiarity itself be disturbing? Or was it just my pity for him that made me sensitive? I could never have imagined feeling pity for anyone, much less him. But then, I'd never imagined being in position where I had pity to waste on someone other than me. Now that I thought about it, I wasn't sure pity was the right word, but I didn't know what it was. I just felt… bad. And I hadn't even done anything. I certainly had never felt bad about any of the things I actually did. Not for long, anyway, and besides that was all past now and there was no cause to remember sins that old. I didn't know if I'd been baptized when I was a baby but my crimes were certainly washed away now.

The sound of applause shook me from my reverie and I glanced at the stage in time to see Christine gazing up at the box I was in. She couldn't see me and I didn't know if she knew I was there or if she wanted me to be. "He won't be back," Moncharmin assured her confidently after a moment, and she turned to him, laughing.

"Then you have lost your greatest patron, Monsieur," she said lightly. "You owe more publicity to him, surely, than to any of your singers." She glided off stage then, towards her dressing room, leaving the manager, the daroga, and I staring after her in silence.

"You've clearly been teaching her something," the Persian commented in dry understatement after a moment. "Perhaps the boy had a point the other day. We'll have a second opera ghost before too long, I think."

The stare I leveled on him usually sent anyone but him fleeing for the hills. "Christine is nothing like me, daroga. You should know that. If anything, she's taught me."

He shrugged. "As you like, Erik," he said, but the corner of his mouth was turned up in the prelude to a grin, as if he was only humoring me.

I stood up. "I have enough to do without trying to decipher what you're talking about," I said irritably.

"I'm not talking about anything at all, Erik. Go home."

I paused at the entrance to the passage. "Daroga… You too. You must have somewhere to go."

He shrugged. "I was thinking I might go find Cécile Jammes," he offered but we both recognized it for the feeble attempt it was. "You get used to being alone, Erik," he said when I didn't move. "You should know that." I nodded, but I wasn't so certain. My resolution had withered with my first sight of her, and I wasn't sure I'd know what to do with myself if faced with it again.


	11. Chapter 11

"I want to go outside."

"What?" I stopped moving, hovering above her, my hands propped on either side of her as she lay on the Persian rug. I was taking a break from my incessant fiddling with the phonograph; I hadn't even left the house in days. "Now?"

"No, I just remembered now that I wanted to ask you."

"Christine, we can talk about this later, can't we?" I had other things on my mind. Well one, if you considered her as one object instead of many interlocking and endlessly fascinating parts.

"You told me you'd change. That if I was with you you'd be happy and you could live like anybody else. We don't live like anybody, Erik."

"Don't you like it here, love? You have the Opera right upstairs. You needn't go anywhere for rehearsals. And I know where you are."

"I know, but we never go anywhere at all." Was that impatience I heard?

"Are you unhappy here with me? Are you bored?"

She shook her head, and the tiny movement of her body was sweet torture. It was all I could do to keep myself still. It seemed irreverent to speak about such mundane things while in the act of loving, an act I felt was tantamount to worship. "No. But there are other places, Erik. Places husbands take their wives. Like…" She paused to think. "Dinner. Or shows. Or walks."

This was starting to get tiresome. "Christine, is this really the time?"

"I have a husband, Erik. I want you with me. What am I going to tell everyone?"

"Could you really see me in restaurant? No one would be able to eat."

"A walk then. We could go for a walk."

"Christine." It sounded more like a moan than a name, but her name was more like a prayer than a mere word anyway.

"Please, Erik?" She moved suddenly, under and around me, and I gasped. "I want to go outside. I want you to take me."

"Yes," I growled finally, unable to resist any longer.

"You'll take me?"

"Yes!" I said and I pushed her knees up and there was no more talking for some minutes.

The truth was, I had said those things about living like regular people with her at my side. It was all nonsense, really. As foolish as my thoughts of forcing her to marry me. I couldn't change the world by sheer force of will, as much as I hated to admit it. Certain people in it, perhaps. But to go outside, in full view, with a mask or without? Man did not posses the technical ability to make this face bearable, not yet anyway, and I had been fooling myself as well as her if I'd thought Sunday afternoon strolls by the Seine were going to be a reality. It didn't matter who was on my arm.

Lying beside her on the rug, pressing my face into hair the color of sunlight (or so I remembered), I realized I had no desire for the outside world. She was the outside to me, and if I'd been looking for some connection to the world around me, some conduit to bring me out of my kingdom of solitude, I had found it in her and there my desire stopped. I had thought she was the means but she was the end. I'd been mistaken, that was all.

But if she'd saved me, a nagging voice said in my mind, why couldn't I change? Haven't you been bragging about how much you've changed? Funny how the voice had acquired a light but distinctive Persian accent somewhere along the line. Very well, I answered back silently. I'll prove you wrong. I glanced at the clock on the mantel and decided it was dark enough.

"Will you be ready for our walk soon, love?" I asked, helping her to her feet.

She smiled and I had to be mistaken about the gleam of triumph that seemed to color it. She was just excited. "Let me change my dress and I will be." Change her dress. As if she had anything to change out of. But she never addressed our intimacy. If I spoke too freely of it or any of the wondrous particulars of her body, she would blush furiously but say nothing. I let her wash up and I did the same, telling myself the whole time that I had to prove this to someone. My pride did allow for the concession of a thick, hooded cloak, however.

We crossed the lake in the boat, Christine in back like a figurehead in reverse while I propelled us with slow strokes. A reluctant Charon who was no longer just the ferryman but a passenger and wasn't at all sure he wanted the ride. I didn't want to reach the other side, but I wouldn't turn back. I was being steered as surely as I rowed this boat, the mockery of that voice and the memory of her hands prodding me in equal measure. I would suffer the scorn of neither, so I had to do this.

I had often thought of the lake as beautiful in some strange secret way, and never more so than now when I had no desire to leave it. The water reflected the light of the lamp back onto Christine's face as she gazed into the distance, and her skin seemed to move and change with the lake's surface. She looked ethereal, as if creating her own light against a backdrop so dark one could hardly tell where the lake ended and the shore began. What need had I of light other than this? What could I possibly have wanted that I did not have now? She looked over at me and smiled and her eyes could have been made of the same stuff as the lake, so dark and fathomless they seemed. Then again, the lake wasn't as deep as it looked.

I docked the boat on the other side, unable to justify further hesitation, and helped her onto the ledge that led to the tunnel that would take us out. This way we wouldn't have to go through the Opera house itself. "Are you ready?" she asked. When I hesitated, she took my hand, and it was enough. It would have to be. I followed her up to the gate only I had the key to, but my hands fumbled so much that she had to take it. "You've done this millions of times, Erik," she said. Aside from the slight exaggeration it was true. I had. And often as not it had ended with someone being hurt or a contract being issued for my eyes to be put out. "I'm with you. Remember that." And she kissed me, fully on the lips. I was never one to take anything for granted and familiarity had not lessened my hunger for her, but as I gave in to it she pushed the gate open and we were outside.

She broke from me instantly, touching only the hand she used to lead me away from the building and onto the middle of the sidewalk. I glanced around at the pedestrians and the carriages and the general activity and wondered of everyone I saw if they'd seen me yet. I was convinced they all had, or were about to. And they would all know that under this hood and this mask which was far too white and still to be human lay the face of a monster and a murderer and a madman and anything else they cared to layer onto it because it was all true and I was all those things. A palimpsest of sin and hate and nightmare. My mouth felt dry and my heart raced and I could feel my breath coming in painful little bursts and I knew with absolute certainly that I couldn't do this. Not even for her.

"Erik?" She was trying to walk down the street, looking for all the world like she was a young wife on the arm of her husband out for an after-dinner stroll. And for her part, she was. She looked perfect; alive, strong, at home. I would never be any of those things, for all my vaunted physical and mental vigor. People divided around us like water flowing around two rocks and I waited anxiously for one of them to touch me. I didn't belong here. I wasn't part of this, which was why I'd abandoned it all those years ago until she'd awakened some desire in me again. I'd mistaken my desire for her for a desire to rejoin the world but how could I have forgotten what it was like? So many eyes, so many minds behind them and you couldn't know what they were thinking or what they'd do. I wasn't afraid of them, not really. I could fight them off if I had to. But I was tired and I didn't want to fight anymore. I had spent the better part of my life trying impossibly to be what they were and it was never going to happen and there wasn't even any reason I should want it to happen. She tugged on my arm and suddenly I was in motion again, only back the way we had come. I didn't even register whether she resisted or not but within moments we were back inside the gate. I leaned against the wall just within, catching my breath. I couldn't do it. I had failed and I didn't even care.

I didn't want to be seen, any more than I wanted her to be. Any contact would break the spell, any intrusion on this finally most perfect of lives would cause the whole thing to dissipate into thin air like one of the soap bubbles she so carelessly popped in the bath. There was nothing wrong with wanting to prevent that. Even if I was a pitiful hermit incapable of human interaction beyond that which I had carefully structured within my own parameters. I had structured it. I had succeeded by dint of my own ingenuity. Wasn't that enough?

"Erik, what is the matter?" she asked. Demanded, rather.

"I can't do this, Christine."

"What do you mean? Do what?"

"I can't… This. Outside. With them. It's been too long, Christine. I'm sorry, but I can't just walk out there like I'm normal. I'm not normal. I tried my whole life to be and this… you… are the closest I've ever come. That has to be enough. It is enough, for me."

She frowned, disappointed. "But you said you could. You told me I could help you, that you wanted me to help you. I thought that was what you wanted. I thought I was doing good." She thought she could make me normal.

"I do want you to help me," I said, trying to decide whether her earnestness was touching or irritating. Probably something of both. "You are doing good; you've given me something to live for, Christine. You've given me faith and life and… and you make me eat and… I don't think I've ever felt this alive."

"Then why can't you do this?"

"Because I'm not alive, Christine. Not really. I can't compete with them; it's like holding a match up to the sun and saying they're both hot."

"What?"

She didn't understand and I could never make her understand. Sometimes I wondered if she even tried or if her eyes just glazed over the minute I started explaining myself. My previous question was answered and I'd settled on irritating. But I could make her understand me somehow. Make her feel me, at any rate. She would listen to this.

My head fit neatly under her skirts and I'd pulled away her underclothes before she could protest. She tried to step away as my tongue found her but I held her fast. Her hands pushed ineffectually at cloth that covered my head.

"What are you doing?" she hissed. I was busy and didn't answer. "Someone will see us."

I leaned back slightly so that my muffled voice could travel up through the layers. "I thought that was what you wanted, Christine." She trembled and I imagined her looking out from between the iron rails, captive and in deadly fright that some passing nobody would see a dim figure in a doorway with her skirts pulled too wide. I touched her until she shook but with that victory it was I who felt defeated, and I lay at her feet, anointing her with my tears. My own personal Christ whom I could only beg to dry with my hair. Even now she bent over me, absolving me, but I couldn't look at her, only huddle on the ground like a pathetic supplicant whose surrender to his god's will is so complete that he's afraid to take a step without divine advice.

"Erik…" Her arms made an attempt to encircle me but I sat up out of her reach, already ashamed of my display. "Erik, tell me. I… I want to understand."

She didn't, even if she thought she did. The only way she could understand was to be like me and neither of us wanted that. I tried anyway. "I'm so weak," I said finally.

"I don't think that."

No, she wouldn't, would she, who only saw what she wanted to see. But I'd been fooled as well. I'd always considered myself nearly indestructible. And now I was undone by an evening's walk, a stray glance, a woman's soft, secret flesh. I was flimsy and brittle and worth less to anyone than ever. My failure made me less deserving of that world than I had been before trying to rejoin it. At least then I'd found confidence in the illusion of my strength.

"You're very strong, Erik. You… you let me into your home. You let me into your life. You didn't have to do that." No, I'd had to. And it was surrender, not strength. "And you've done so much for me."

"Have I?" I stood, impatient already with the line of thought. It was silly, really. I'd be dead if I was really that weak, wouldn't I?

She stood with me. "Of course. You made my papa's dream come true. And mine. Don't you think that's important?"

"I suppose so," I ventured.

"I don't need to go outside, really. It doesn't matter that much. And maybe… maybe I pushed you too hard and you weren't ready. Maybe when you're more comfortable we can try again." I let her talk but steered her towards the boat. I was never going outside again, I knew, but there was no reason to tell her that now. I rowed us back home in silence, and I knew that sooner, rather than later, I had to record her singing. It was Wednesday, and the opening was only two days away.

Luckily Christine had been given the day off on Thursday in order to rest. Not content with missing rehearsal, she insisted on singing the last trio in Faust with me. I had been working on my phonograph during every possible moment, and whatever improvements I had been able to make would have to suffice for now. I told her I had something to finish first and that I would appreciate her leaving me for a few minutes, during which time I brought the machine in and set it up behind a screen. Only the microphone had to catch her voice, and I tried to ensure that its placement would allow for the best sound, though of course I hadn't tested it with piano and two voices.

"I'm ready, Christine," I called from the doorway. I had only to touch a switch and the motor would start turning, the needle begin its transcribing of what I was certain would become a legendary talent.

She entered and came to kiss me on the forehead before we sang. I gazed at her angelic face as she settled herself next to where I sat to play the piano and I tried to imagine her as Marguerite, sentenced to death for the murder of her own child. I would sing Mephistopheles when I could and Faust during the trio although I knew I was probably the devil since no one had ever offered me youth or knowledge or beauty in exchange for my soul. I would have taken him up on the offer, given the chance. I would sell my soul for her, I thought, just as Faust had, and suddenly we were singing and the room erupted in sound and motion, Faust pleading for Marguerite to come away with him while she can do nothing but remember the past days of their love. Our voices soared and dipped and whirled around each other until I felt delirious with it. I could almost see the wings of angels when they came to take her away to heaven.

"Why are thy hands reddened with blood? Go! I abhor thy sight!"

Her last lines rang in the silence which followed and I heard the click of the phonograph needle coming to the end of the disc. I felt condemned. It wasn't the opera or the music or any of that: I'd always considered opera a form badly in need of some innovation and in fact it was a little trying living somewhere like this where one heard the same trite stories and hackneyed composition night after night. But her voice… our voices, together, were magic, and it had nothing to do with the kind of sleight of hand I had mastered in my travels. One could trick the ears but not the soul. It didn't matter what words we sang or who we were; our voices would mean something to anyone listening. And I had captured it! I had plucked that perfect moment from the air and etched it indelibly onto that unassuming disc of metal alloy behind the screen. I almost showed it to her then and there, but I held myself back, focusing instead on her shining eyes as she looked vaguely down at me.

"I'm ready," she said. I nodded. She was more than ready. She was too good for them and I didn't see why anyone else should have the chance to see her. "I wish I was singing it with you tomorrow night," she said softly. "It seems more real with you."

I looked down at my hands. Did she want it to be real? Could she see the blood on them? Did she think about the lives I'd taken with them as they touched parts of her no one else ever had? "We both know that's out of the question, my love," I said. I had accomplished far more in my life than any baritone soloist, but it was all underground, undercover, unacknowledged. Suddenly it was all I wanted to be a mindless male diva. Had it been decided that my multitude of talents made up for the fact I couldn't display any of them? Better to have been born without the capacity to understand my fate.

But no. I didn't really believe that. Not anymore anyway, and looking back I realized that I probably never had wished for death or ignorance. I had reveled in my talents while simultaneously lamenting the life I created with them. If I'd wanted death, I would have found it. I'd guided so many others that I surely knew the way. And now I wanted us both to live forever. I'd been so wrong in trying to join life, not knowing how much easier it was to create my own.

"You would have been the best," she said, and those simple words were among the most moving I'd ever heard. I was happy, I told myself. Tomorrow and the opening and all my fear didn't matter. This is what happiness means. No crowd's mere adoration could take that from me. Christine was bound to me with blood and music and every devoted fiber of this worthless body.


	12. Chapter 12

The morning of Christine's second debut dawned bright and fair, if her disposition was any indication. For myself, it was dismal. The artificial day of the wall-covering seemed to mock me. I couldn't say where the sense of foreboding came from, because to look at it everything was perfect. I considered myself too reasonable for paranoia, but I also considered myself mad, and there was a contradiction in there somewhere that I could find if I thought hard enough. But as the hour drew nearer, each one that passed punctuated by her growing excitement, I found myself imagining a line of suitors outside her dressing room. They were all exact copies of Chagny and bore her frankincense and myrrh and all wanted her for their savior. I thought perhaps it might reassure me to touch her, to prove again that she was real and mine and here. She only laughed.

"Erik! I have to prepare," she said, pulling away from my embrace.

"But you don't look busy, my love. Surely you have some time to spare for your nervous husband."

"Nervous?" She looked at me with round eyes. "Why are you nervous? Should I be? You do think I'll be alright, don't you?"

I sighed. "Of course, Christine. You'll be perfect. You know that as well as I do." I kissed the top of her head and retreated. I wasn't sure what caused my reticence; I'd taken what I wanted before this. But somehow I didn't have the will to. It was a curious lassitude unrelated to the lust or fear or possessiveness I felt. I spent the rest of the day watching her over the covers of various books whose titles I can't remember and waiting. My spirits revived somewhat when I recalled the gift I had for her after the performance, and I dwelt on this one ray of light as I dressed. I took special care with myself that night, both to honor the importance she attached to the event and in an attempt to regain some calm. It is always easier to remain collected when one is aware of looking impeccable.

We walked up together, traveling the same direction but to two wildly different destinations. I dropped her off in her dressing room with a kiss and waited behind the mirror just long enough to hear her squeal of delight upon finding the roses and chocolates I'd left there for her. I was planning on getting to my box early, to beat the patrons coming in and to be certain that I missed nothing. I would probably be forced to wait in the column until the lights went down and the interior of the box wasn't quite so visible, but I would be close at hand.

It had been some time since I'd attended the opera during a performance. Christine had always been tired from her rehearsals and I had had my own reasons for persuading her to come to bed early. So I was somewhat unprepared for the noise that started about an hour before curtain and only swelled as the champagne flowed and the those in the crowd recognized each other. In the past I might have crept behind walls to overhear their conversations, but tonight I merely waited for what should be my triumph but what I anticipated was a sentencing. I was not, however, to be saved from gossip.

The tapping on the hollowed marble surprised me, and I hesitated. Who could it be, I wondered, who would suspect this little hiding place?

"It's me, Erik."

Deciding the Persian accent was probably not faked, I opened the panel enough to determine it was him and then was forced to open it fully since the sliver of vision made me doubt it could be. It looked like the daroga, sure enough, but some alternate version I'd never seen before. He looked like a visiting prince from the East who wasn't accustomed to our manner of dress but was going to do his damndest to fit in. If one looked closely it was apparent that some tailoring of secondhand goods had been involved, but he looked ten years younger when he wasn't dressed in his old brown suit.

"I almost didn't recognize you," I said, my anxiety momentarily forgotten. "Why don't you dress like this all the time?"

He smiled, self-conscious but pleased, I thought. "I don't like dressing like this. Besides, the pension goes only so far and translating work is hard to come by. But I got the invitation and—" My look of confusion must have been obvious even partially obscured. "You didn't know? I got a card in the mail notifying me that a ticket would be waiting for me at the box office. Imagine my surprise when it was Box 5. My my, we do have a brand new opera ghost. I thought it was you, actually. Such a formal invitation required some sartorial effort on my part. Are you going to sit in that blasted thing all night? No one's looking for you anymore, you know."

I glanced out, certain that policemen lurked in wait for just such an action on my part, but the audience was oblivious. "They're too busy looking at themselves to pay any attention to two old men," he commented as I stepped from my hiding place and into the shadows at the back of the box. I had become obsolete, I realized. Opera ghosts might be a novelty, but fashion and society and gossip marched on regardless. He turned from his perusal of faces to glance at me. "You look flawless, as always. It's a good thing you aren't, or you'd be even more insufferable than you are." He said it so calmly, so without apparent intent to insult, that I barely even noticed the allusion to my face. There was a time… but I was saying that too much lately. That time, whatever it was, was gone. Had I grown comfortable with myself? Or him? Or was I just getting old?

"I'm surprised she sent you the ticket without telling me," I said.

"As am I."

"I suppose she thinks that having friends is part of that 'normal life' she's so intent upon us having."

He looked at me. "I think she just likes being sure she knows where I am. Anyway, I thought a normal life was your wish. There's nothing normal about being an opera singer. In fact, I doubt any of the three of us has any concept of normal. I daresay that's why she and Chagny broke it off. He's normal, Erik. Is that what you want?"

I shook my head. I'd lost sight of what I wanted along the way to having it. "I have what I want. What I want now is for nothing to change."

"I don't think it works that way. Everything changes."

"Not her."

"I wouldn't be so confident if I were you." I glared at him and he held up his hands. "I don't want to fight with you tonight. Though you should know there's been talk about her."

I narrowed my eyes. I'd kill them. "What kind of talk?" I demanded.

He shrugged. "People have noticed… things. Her voice has improved beyond what it was when she was last on that stage. And I've heard a few people talking about how they never see her leaving the Opera. She's a little more tired and a little less unhappy. People notice these things, Erik. People notice when she doesn't socialize with the others, when she runs back to her dressing room after every rehearsal and never leaves. It was one thing when she was in the chorus, but now she's a lead. People will scrutinize her actions much more closely. It's quite a different crime to be stand-offish when you're famous than when you're nobody. Though I have no doubt that's mostly due to your influence."

"Are you suggesting I keep her from having friends?" I demanded.

He twitched his shoulders again. "It wouldn't be outside the realm of possibility, knowing you."

"Well she shouldn't need anyone except for me," I contested hotly. "What do you want me to do, daroga? Move into a nice apartment? Take her to church and dinner on Sundays? Play the doting husband on her arm when she receives her fanatics? That's what she wants too, and it's not happening. I've tried, daroga. I tried to give that to her and I can't do it. We went for a walk a few days ago and I couldn't stand being out there, being watched. I don't want to be out there. I like it here and I have what I need and there's no reason anything has to change."

"Change is life, Erik," he said gently, his face sad. "You've decided to live now, haven't you? Just as I did when I let you go. I can't say I would have chosen this life, but I don't regret missing the slow death that court would have demanded of me. The only way to escape change is to die. And I don't think you've ever wanted that."

I shook my head. I was glad, now, that I hadn't died. Though I could have skipped several of the intervening years without missing them. "Why did you do it, daroga? Why didn't you let me die? Surely I deserved it."

"Perhaps. But we all die eventually, so I assume we all deserve it. I let you go because I'm a terrible policeman, Erik. I always was. Justice and law and order and all that held little appeal for me. It was the crime I found fascinating. The personality of the criminal and why he did things the rest of us certainly thought but couldn't bring ourselves to do. Usually I had no trouble meting out justice when it was necessary: I understand the value of order. But you… you weren't an ordinary criminal. You made me laugh and you made me think and you gave me something I hadn't realized I'd been missing there. And so when the opportunity came, I could both martyr myself to you and at the same time become the kind of noble criminal I admired so much. It was my way out." He laughed suddenly and when I met his eyes I found myself remembering what he'd told me on the banks of the lake the other day. "Of course, I've been thinking about why I gave it all up for so many years I had to come up with some excuse for myself. Who knows, Erik? I just know I'm glad I did it."

"So am I," I said softly, and I actually meant it.

He smiled. "Are you shocked, Erik? It must be upsetting to learn I'm as selfish as you are. You'll have to take me out of your 'saint' column, if you haven't already."

I was still considering this when the lights went down and the orchestra began. The inane chatter didn't really diminish but the hum did become slightly more respectful. All other thought left my head as I lay in wait for her, a musical ambush at the ready. When she appeared to Faust in a vision I began glancing around as if I could read the thoughts of the audience as they looked at her, but half of them weren't looking anyway and the rest might as well have been masked, so little their faces told me. I would have to wait until she sang.

But from her appearance in the second act onwards, I could spare no thought for anything but her. Her tone was as sweet and pure as she, as pure as Marguerite herself, and I knew that her previous success was nothing to this and that by this time tomorrow Paris would have a new favorite. She could do anything she wished now, and while I knew that I would have to try harder to keep her close I could do nothing but admire her. And I knew it was not only my partiality that made me think so. After her first few lines, the crowd seemed to hush whenever she sang. She wasn't just singing but filling those inadequate words with everything behind them and making us feel them. No one on stage could contend with her but no one selfishly tried to overshadow her; it was her night and everyone in that room knew it. My pride knew no bounds and I wanted to shout her triumph, and mine, to everyone. I wanted them all to know who had taught her and who her husband was and how utterly perfect she was in every way and I wanted to bury myself in her so deep that I would never have to leave and she could never leave me behind and we would triumph together forever. I spent the intermission in an ecstasy of her, just imagining the admiration and envy being leveled at her now. I was anticipating her return to her dressing room, flushed with excitement and praise but no longer belonging to the crowd but to me alone where I would make her mine again in as many different ways as I could think of. The daroga sat in companionable silence next to me and in truth I barely remembered he was there.

It was only in Act IV that my uneasiness returned. I had thought that the innocent joy of the Jewel Song would be Christine's triumphant moment, her forte, but there was something about her Marguerite after Faust abandoned her that was more touching than anything I'd seen from her before. There was a kind of desperation, too large for her tiny, girlish figure, that caught hold of everyone and made us feel as if we were in church with her, trying hopelessly to pray with the Devil himself standing behind us. It was virtuosic, new, and entirely disturbing. Still, I wasn't sure why this should affect me. I was just impressed and moved by her performance. Her acting, her control, her expression had all improved more than I could have imagined, more than I'd noticed in our lessons together. As I waited all through the pointless Act V ballet my anxiety grew, the more frustrating for not knowing its source. Perhaps I was only nervous for her, I thought, but I knew there was no reason to be. She was perfect.

The curtain opened on the prison set, Christine in white with her hair streaming loose down her back like some kind of maiden saint. But her voice! If I had thought her to embody a character before this, it was nothing next to what I saw now. She was fire and stone and crystal and it seemed to me that her passion was laid bare to all, like a beacon which sought to lead Faust to his damnation just as he had led her to hers. I had never seen a Marguerite like this one and I had never thought, for all her talent, that my Christine could show us in the space of a few hours a woman's journey from utter purity to abject corruption and back. She was perfect, in other words, and it was her very perfection which cried out to me as a warning. This was not the perfection of perfect innocence, an unwanted voice told me. And yet, Marguerite was redeemed at the end, as always. After the last angelic chorus, which of course was made up of mere mortals and could not possibly outshine Christine, I was able to turn to the daroga and found him crying. It was some time before we could hear ourselves to talk over the furious din of applause.

"I didn't know, Erik," he said, not bothering to hide his tears. "You should go to her."

"Yes," I said, the uneasiness still with me but that was only logical, given the state her dressing room must be in right now. "Thank you for coming, daroga."

"She sang for you tonight, you know. She'll want to see you." I only hoped that was true. There were so many options for her now, and I felt as uncertain as I had when she'd first come back and I thought she was a product of my diseased and fermented mind.

I left the daroga in the box and hurried down, through back ways and trick doors, to her dressing room. She was already there and I paused a moment to take the sight in, not because the room was filled with admirers or well-wishers but because she seemed to fill the room herself. She wasn't fainting like the first time, not weak at all. She was as animated as I'd ever seen her and I thought perhaps I recognized in her that first rush of power.

Opening the mirror confirmed it. She fairly pulled me into the room and grasped my hands in hers, staring imploringly into my eyes. "I was good, wasn't I?" she breathed. "No, I was marvelous. Did you hear them, Erik? Did you hear me? I didn't think I could sound like that. To think that was in me all along and I never knew. I feel… I've never felt like this before! I feel as if I could do anything at all."

"You were brilliant, Christine. You were perfection itself. You can do anything you want now. You do realize that, don't you?" This was a Christine I wasn't certain I'd met before, and she puzzled me. It wasn't just her enthusiasm or her joy, although those were certainly heightened. There was something about her, the way she held herself, the tone of her voice, that I didn't recognize.

"We ought to celebrate!" she said, and my stomach lurched with foreboding. I couldn't follow her out there, where doubtless hundreds of people waited to laud her and love her and I couldn't kill all of them and I couldn't keep her except by force.

"I have a gift for you at home. Would you like to see it?"

It worked. "A present? You do give the most wonderful presents. We can celebrate at home."

We almost raced through the dark passages we knew by touch now, and I felt as excited as if I were the one getting the gift. She had to like it, I thought. She had to be impressed. It was impressive, really-I had done what few people in the world had, and I had done it for her. It certainly could be improved but it was still a marvel, by any reckoning.

I was nearly breathless with excitement by the time we arrive in the parlor, and it had all but smothered the anxiety I'd been feeling over her. "Where is it?" she asked, and I drew out the phonograph from where it hid behind the screen. I had yet to hear it, so in actuality it was a gift to me. I replaced the needle and started the motor and through a faint scratching there emerged her voice. There was still a rather metallic sound to it and it could by no means fully capture the experience of hearing her, but while I was disappointed in myself it was obviously her we were listening to. And then I came in, a rather dark tenor, and as our voices met and melded and mated themselves to one another I realized this was the proof I'd been seeking. I could hear us in those voices, not just how we sounded but to some extent who we were. Mostly, it was proof of our union; tangible, solid evidence that she had given herself to me if I ever had cause to doubt the recalled sensations of my body. It was the only mirror in which I'd ever seen what I wanted to see.

"Where is it?" Christine asked suddenly. I turned to see her looking at me expectantly.

"The music?"

"No, the present."

I stared at her. "This is the present," I said, gesturing to the phonograph. Well, the recording really; I didn't see what use she had for the machine itself.

"Oh. It's very nice, Erik." She smiled but the twisting in my gut told me she didn't like it at all, she hated it; she wanted a real present.

"What do you mean? It's brilliant! Do you understand what this is, Christine? We can make music that lasts forever. It never has to die. That's you, Christine, projected back to you so you can hear what a marvel you are. I can't believe that doesn't fascinate you."

"Is that why you did this? In case I die?" she asked. She really didn't see the point.

"No. Well, yes, somewhat. But I wanted to show you what you've given everyone. I wanted to show you what you mean to me. And… and I wanted to prove to you that I can be useful and good."

She frowned. "But why? You don't think I have any doubts about that, do you?"

"You'd be pretty foolish not to, given my history, given what I've done to you."

"You haven't done anything to me, Erik," she said, coming to stand in front of me. "Only taught me how to sing and how to feel."

This wasn't going right at all. Panic started to rise inside me as inexorably as lust and just as difficult to contain. "What do you mean, Christine?" I asked much more softly than the importance I gave the answer would imply.

"Just that you've shown me so many things, Erik. I understand so much more than I did. I was such a fool, when I first came here. I was so quiet and shy and weak. I was so innocent and worthless. You taught me how to overcome that. You taught me how to get what I want from life, how to make decisions for myself. Don't you think that's a worthy thing? As worthy as my coming back to save you?"

She was confusing me now. Innocent and worthless? "But your innocence is what makes you great, Christine. That's who you are. That's what saved me."

She tossed her head defiantly and laughed softly. "Then you've returned the favor and saved me from my innocence. And I'm glad, Erik. When I think of marrying Raoul, of being shut away from life, from opera, from my husband even, I'm always glad I didn't."

It was too much. She was different, so utterly different. "What happened to you?" My voice was nearly pleading. "What happened tonight?"

The blush on her face gave me hope, a little. "Nothing, Erik. Just… being on that stage, singing the way I did… it didn't make me tired this time. It made me feel alive. I knew I wanted to be a singer, but I'm not sure I knew exactly why until now. And I have you to thank for that too. I feel like… I feel like you've freed me from something I didn't even know held me back."

I was stunned. I felt as if iron claws were tightening around my body so that I couldn't move from the scene of some tragedy that kept happening over and over in front of me. I didn't know what it all meant but I knew I didn't understand what she was saying to me. I let her lead me blindly to the sofa and we sat next to each other. Suddenly she reached over, pulled off the mask, and kissed me.

"I don't know when I've ever felt so alive," she exclaimed almost breathlessly after pulling away. "Thank you for everything, Erik." Her little hands crept steadily up my legs but instead of arousing my lust it only served to make me feel suspicious and uncertain. She took advantage of my paralysis to undo my trousers and without warning climbed over me. I stared up at her in shock. There was a buzzing sensation in my head and I thought I might faint.

"Erik?" Her weight across my lap seemed unsupportable now. Not like that first time I carried her down here. She'd been a feather. An angel's wing. "What's wrong? Surely we can do it this way too." She took me in her hands but there was nothing. I felt nothing.

It frightened me so much that I started up, upsetting her balance. I righted my attire and turned to face her. "What do you think you're doing?" I demanded.

"I wanted to celebrate," she said. Her flushed face gazed up at me from where she sat in disarray on the couch and I suddenly found it distasteful. It wasn't the blush of innocence confronted with my depravity. It was the flush of desire, of common want, and I hated it. "I wanted to make love to my husband. What's the matter with you?"

"The matter with me?" I had to work to keep my voice in control. "The matter with me? Nothing's wrong with me, Christine. It's you! I don't know what you're doing. I hardly recognize you!"

"What are you talking about?" she asked in true confusion and a little crossly. "You seemed perfectly happy before."

"But you're not yourself tonight, Christine. Surely you must see that."

"Why? Because I know what I want? Because I want to give you what you want?"

"But… I have what I want. I have you. I changed for you, Christine. I was good for you."

She laughed again and I found I hated the sound. "You haven't changed at all, Erik. And I'm glad. Because you're what I want, the way you are. You've shown me that, and I'm happy. If I wanted what all those girls up there want I'd be Madame de Chagny. You just helped me find that out."

Her earnestness repulsed me. In fact, I could hardly look at her anymore. But I couldn't accept that; it didn't make sense. I just stood there shaking my head. "I needed you to be good, Christine. I need you to be what I can't."

She frowned. "But I am good, Erik. There's nothing wrong with either of us. I've been trying to show you that."

The horrible thought dawned on me that she didn't even know. I'd corrupted her and she couldn't tell the difference. Had I twisted her that grotesquely? Of course I had. I couldn't help but do otherwise. I'd assumed that her virtue was the stronger, but I'd been wrong. My sin, my rotting, sullied flesh, was incapable of salvation. I had only ever been good at destruction. And I knew suddenly that I was going to destroy this too.

"I'm sorry, Christine." My voice was barely a whisper, as if my strength had eloped with my love for her.

"Sorry for what?"

"I'm sorry. I can't… I can't do this. I can't bear what I've done to you. You were perfect and I loved you and I ruined you."

"But you didn't ruin anything!" she cried. "I'm not ruined! I'm alive and I'm happy and I love you!"

I shook my head. "A creature as good as you couldn't possibly love something like me. Not really; not for what I am."

"That doesn't make any sense," she countered. She looked angry now. "What do you want, Erik? You want perfect, angelic purity? Or do you want a wife? You've done enough to take my innocence, haven't you? And now you don't want what's left. Is that it?"

Was she, of all people, going to use logic on me now? "I don't understand, Christine. You've never spoken to me like this before. This isn't you."

"But it is. Finally. You were right; something did happen tonight. Something wonderful. I stopped being afraid of myself. Or of you. I was trying so hard to be what you wanted that I forgot what I wanted and tonight I realized it's the same thing and I'm tired of being afraid. Isn't that what you've taught me? And now that I am what you told me to be you don't think I'm good enough."

"No." I was an empty shell. I couldn't even summon the desire to die.

"I love you, Erik. Isn't that what matters?"

"I thought so. But no." It wasn't it really wasn't and she had no idea. I hadn't known until I'd said it.

She stared at me, abruptly very still. "But I've always loved you. In some way. I even told you so. I remember; you were so happy you cried. Didn't you believe me then?"

I hesitated. I'd wanted to, I remembered that much. But I hadn't dared credit it. I'd settled for her desire to love me, to save me. It was enough. "It doesn't matter anymore, Christine." I said. My tone held the finality of the swipe of a guillotine. With it, even the nostalgic sentimentality I'd felt mere minutes before was severed from me.

"I don't understand," she said and where there had been anger there were now the beginnings of a plea. "Do you really mean this… what you're saying?" Her eyes were so big I might once have felt I was bound to lose myself in them if I got too close but now I could only see myself reflected in them and that was something I'd avoided since being dragged to the mirror by my mother. "Please don't do anything foolish, Erik. I don't know what you're thinking but you can't do it, not now. I'm your wife."

"Not legally. I'm certain no one will hold you to it."

"I can't believe it," she whispered. "I never thought you…" She burst into tears and even that meant nothing to me. "What are you going to do? What am I going to do?"

"The first doesn't concern you anymore. And the last doesn't concern me; although you're quite famous now and shouldn't have any trouble doing anything you like. Or anyone, for that matter." I felt as though I was watching myself in a play, devoid of all association with the characters involved. And while part of me knew it was wrong most of me didn't care at all and none of me could stop.

"But I want to stay here," she said. She was starting to sound like a spoiled child. I should have known she couldn't keep up her new-found assertiveness for long.

"I don't think that's an option anymore. Though of course you're welcome to take anything you like from your bedroom. You'll forgive me if I keep the present I made you. You didn't seem all that interested anyway."

"Please tell me you're joking. You're playing one of your tricks."

"No. I only play tricks on people I want something from. You no longer qualify." I almost thought she would slap me and perhaps I was hoping she would, but she only stood there like a petulant, overlooked suitor in a bad farce. "I'm very tired, Christine. I really would rather be alone right now."

"You're the most heartless, callous creature I've ever seen," she said. Her eyes were bloodshot and terrible and her skin mottled with anger and I really couldn't bring myself to regret anything.

"You can't pretend you weren't warned. You were supposed to cure me of that."

I might as well have slapped her. "I hate you." The words came parsed out deliberately as if she was learning a new language. Lesson learned, she repeated it, this time at a much higher volume. And then suddenly, like the passing of a thunderstorm, she was gone. The silence was almost deafening.

Alone I walked over to her door and shut it. The sound of the catch snapping into place resounded and made me realize just how empty these rooms were without her. As I wandered aimlessly around them I felt despair nosing in around the cracks and I fought to keep it at bay. I didn't want her back. But I wanted back what I had. I wasn't used to being alone anymore. I wasn't strong enough. I couldn't figure out what had gone wrong but I knew it was my fault somehow. Somehow my love had killed itself. I felt a little foolish for being surprised. I should have known that Christine, as she was, was unattainable. An ideal in human flesh, but on a pedestal and meant to stay there. I had created the monster's bride, not from pieces of unwanted humanity but from this stupid, silly, innocent, perfect girl.

But I wasn't quite alone, I realized as I caught sight of the phonograph. I had the memory of my love. And that was proof at least that something had been here. That I hadn't fabricated the entire thing. That I'd been able to capture her voice for just one moment, as I had failed to do her soul.

Part of me envied her. I'd never had a choice about selling mine. Not that it mattered. I wouldn't have hesitated.

I knew the knock at the door wasn't her. I opened it and the daroga stood there, still dressed in his cast-off finery and looking smaller than I remembered.

"I saw her, Erik," he said softly, and I couldn't read him at all. "She said you shouldn't be alone."

Without a word I turned and walked into the house, knowing he'd follow. I heard the door close behind me as I reached the phonograph and placed the needle at the outer edge of the recording and he had already settled onto the couch by the time I joined him. Not a word was exchanged but it was enough. The voices twined around us, reminding me that there was a moment when I had been alive and had loved and had forgotten just what I was. It was enough.

Notes: So, here it is. Written nearly ten years ago now, and presented largely without edits. I always intended to go back and re-write the whole thing. When I realized this isn't at all what I'd write now, I decided to let it out into the world anyway. There is a lot I don't like about it, but I'm not the same person. And I hope the story will still hold appeal for some. Mostly, it's reactionary, against a trend I saw in Erik's characterization. This goes, perhaps, too far a different way (and leans too heavily on Susan Kay), but I think there is probably space for non-romantic relationship stories. Thanks so much for bearing with me!


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